Demands for the Covid-19 Pandemic crisis

We have an imbecilic Prime Minister and a Government behaving like a rabbit in the headlights. Now Johnson claims he can resolve this crisis in twelve weeks. As one wag in the media noted, this slogan could be painted on the side of a bus.

They are lurching from one U-turn to another, reacting to events clearly overtaking them. Much of their policy-making has been in response to what others have already decided. Advising self-isolation and staying away from pubs, clubs and theatres were measures that the public and even some businesses had already decided for Johnson and the Government.

The same could be said about the closure of schools, which already had large numbers of pupils and teachers missing. The Government then found itself having to respond likewise after devolved Scotland and Wales announced schools would close from Friday. The largest teachers’ union, the National Education Union, had already called for this.

The government has been dragged reluctantly toward implementing some of the advice of the World Health Organisation, ‘a day late and a dollar short’, and is still dragging its feet.  A Tory government that has almost wrecked the NHS since 2010 with austerity; deliberate underfunding that has overseen the cutting of 17,000 beds; savage cuts to social care services; operations delayed and cancelled; and a decline in staffing resulting in a shortage of 100,000 NHS staff; the Tories tried to destroy the NHS and cannot care less about healthcare for the poor and the working class.

Already two London hospitals are at crisis point with a chronic lack of beds. Northwick Park Hospital has declared this critical requesting help from other hospitals. One senior doctor described the situation as “f***ing petrifying.” The same can be said of the Tories’ complete disdain of workers who have been treated with utter contempt, seeing their real wages decline year on year since 2010.

The Chancellor’s ‘rescue package’ was just a public relations exercise, a headline grabber, which soon unravelled. The £330 billion package is simply a money printing exercise by the BoE, a bail out with a loan package that would be underwritten by the taxpayer. Small businesses and workers, already finding themselves in difficulties are being ‘supported’ by saddling them with even more debt and interest added to boot, albeit after a 12 months interest-free period.

The government have since announced further measures, such as its job retention scheme: employees unable to work are paid 80% of their wages, stopping employers making them unemployed; tax breaks such as  VAT deferral for three months; and raising benefits. While welcome to a degree, these people cannot be trusted. This must be implemented without delay and be accessed easily. There is ambiguity around protecting those in the ‘gig economy’ on zero hours contracts and workers need vigilance and organisation through unions etc. to stop employers taking advantage.

This pandemic has exposed the Tories catastrophic economic programme and the crisis within the capitalist system, which has not recovered from the economic crisis in 2008. The system is convulsing, and workers are in danger of yet again paying the price for the failures of the capitalist class. We need a workers’ government to put the needs of the working class before the needs of people like the billionaire Richard Branson, who are yet again demanding bailouts. We are witnessing a major shock and upheaval to the system, small businesses going to the wall and workers being laid off.

We, the Trotskyist Faction of Socialist Fight, recognise the bankruptcy of the capitalist system and as Marxists we understand that it needs to be overcome, i.e. overthrown and abolished root and branch. While we demand reforms in the here and now, under the present bourgeois ‘democratic’ system such changes can only be forced upon capitalism through fear of working-class people below.  With the public health crisis unfolding we must hold the Government to account, we must put forward a simple set of demands to defend the interests of workers who now find themselves in difficult circumstances.

HEALTHCARE

We demand immediate requisition and nationalisation of all private hospitals, facilities and staff, as the Spanish government has done. Sickness should not be profited from. We see no reason why the government (i.e. the taxpayer) should pay £2.4 million a day for additional beds during a national crisis.

NHS staff are having to share masks, Personal Protective Equipment (PPE) out of date, and in some cases none. We demand that all front-line NHS staff are fully protected.

Testing for COVID-19 must be increased without delay following WHO guidelines; the government’s increase from 4,000 per day to a target of 25,000, while welcome, is nowhere near enough. Testing must be available to all who need it. Despite claims of improvement and upgrading the numbers, at present ionly 6,000 per day are being carried out. We have seen elsewhere how testing is crucial and the ability it provides the authorities to have adequate information to contain the virus.

Private testing is cos ting £300, while NHS staff are unable to get tested. Tests must be free, and top priority for NHS staff.

The government must immediately commence large scale production of ventilators and other essentials required for the NHS, and must commandeer industry to do this.

WORKERS

Workers are already losing jobs, facing reduced hours, or unpaid leave. They must not be made unemployed; there must be no redundancies, no loss of pay during this public health crisis. No attacks on workers’ rights, or jobs, should be permitted or tolerated.

While we welcome the workers retention scheme, no worker should lose 20% of their wages. We demand full pay for those affected. This should include workers from the gig economy, on zero-hour contracts and the self-employed.. We must demand the abolition of zero-hours contracts and fake self-employment. Workers must have legally-binding hours with sick pay, holiday pay, paid maternity and paternity leave etc. as of right. If the employer cannot provide hours workers should be paid anyway. This is a basic minimum.

While the government has offered a ‘mortgage holiday’ of three months (which has not been guaranteed by the lenders), we demand mortgage, rents and utility bills be paid by the government in full during the pandemic which threatens workers and their families. Banks and corporations are bailed out and supported;  government must do the same for workers, whose exploitation is the basis of capitalist economy.

SCHOOLS AND EDUCATION

We welcome the closure of schools, and the plan to temporarily convert them to child care facilities for the children of essential workers, such as nurses, doctors,, other healthcare staff, emergency services personnel, delivery drivers, essential manufacturing sector staff, essential public service staff, etc.  

Testing must be available to staff and children for safety. Parents who look after children must get paid leave for the duration and compulsory job security, enforced by the state.

Children unable to take examinations must not be disadvantaged. Marking on previous mock exams and work throughout the school year is subjective and ignores students who may ‘perform’ during a real examination. We demand provision for students of all ages whose education is disrupted to re-sit course years at the state’s expense as an exceptional measure.

Schools now have online learning platforms for homework, which can be utilised for lessons. However, disadvantaged children from poorer families may not have access to the internet or a computer. Facilities for these must be provided free.

Food must be provided to vulnerable children who no longer find themselves at school and having access to a nutritious meal. Over 4 million children live in poverty and being fed at school is their only chance of a decent meal. This needs to be co-ordinated with local authorities.

THE HOMELESS

The government must ensure that the homeless are given immediate protection with a roof over their head. Statistics published by the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government (MHCLG) put empty homes in England in October 2018 at 634,453. Shelter showed that there were 320,000 homeless for the same period. With one person dying on the streets every 19 hours, individuals vulnerable to exposure to the virus, we demand that these people are housed.

PRISONS

This week (18 March) a prisoner was diagnosed as being positive with COVID-19. The prison system is extremely overcrowded and as such would be an ideal environment for a rapid outbreak of infection. Under the Ministry of Justice’s own definition of safety and decency, the prison estate should not hold more than 74,954 people. There are currently 8,759 men and women held above this level.

Overcrowding is not evenly distributed, which results in some prisons holding many more than they are designed for. We demand those held for low level crimes, or due to be released within 12 months are released to ease pressure on the system.

DETENTION CENTRES

There are 12 in the UK. Many of them overcrowded with refugees detained in appalling conditions. There are no restrictions on how long people can be detained in these centres. We demand refugees, many escaping conflict zones, and all detainees are not treated like criminals and caged but released. These detention centres, just like prisons, are ideal hubs for the virus. They should be closed down, and removals stopped, as the possibility of migrants and refugees dying of disease just underlines that they are in fact concentration camps.

PANIC BUYING AND RATIONING

The government really need to get a grip with panic buying, and ensuring that the supply chain is able to keep up with demand to enable stores to have adequate stock so the elderly and healthcare workers (many who are working long shifts) are able to put food on their table. Many supermarkets are seeing large queues, which presents a huge health risk, and empty shelves after just a few hours trading.  

If this crisis deepens there will be a serious risk of anti-social manifestations, such as the riotous pushing in that took place at a London Aldi branch with hundreds defying attempts at rationing. According to the government, there is a shortage of delivery drivers. If so, coach drivers should be redeployed to drive delivery vehicles.

A proper rationing system must be put in place by the government for foodstuffs and sanitary-related goods, just as a basic necessity for health and hygiene. This should be overseen and supervised by rank-and-file trade unionists at local level who must seek to draw in the poor and those most at risk from this crisis. We need collective organisation not ‘dog-eat-dog’ and lumpen violence among those at risk. We cannot depend on the ‘goodwill’ of chains like Tesco and Sainsbury’s to bring about a fair rationing system. There needs to be workers inspection of profiteering and businesses that abuse the shortages to raise prices must be expropriated.

GOVERNMENT POWERS AND THE CORONAVIRUS BILL

The government are set to give police sweeping powers to arrest and detain suspected coronavirus sufferers, and stop all public assemblies, which would remove the right to protest. The police will have powers to take blood and swab tests, demand personal information (which at present people arrested have the right to withhold). Refusal will be a criminal offence.

The bill extends the validity of warrants under the Investigatory Powers Act of 2016 and relaxes protections for those cared for under mental health acts. It cancels local elections in England this spring; and empowers government to potentially cancel other elections, should the crisis continue into 2021.

The pandemic must not be allowed to be used as an excuse to trample over civil liberties. While we acknowledge the need for the quarantine to protect public health, there are serious dangers with the new law. Labour are correctly opposing it being on the statute books for two years, without any control by parliament, who ought to have the duty to expire it if the threat from the pandemic is overcome.

This crisis signals the total discredit of Thatcher’s neoliberal economics. Working class people of this country, seeing a second bailout in 12 years are now starting to see through the lies being told, they will not easily buy the austerity agenda a second time around. The public health crisis and the impoverishment of the working class is a permanent issue. Now a pandemic has forced even this Tory government to back-peddle and make a show of saying they will put this right, to avoid huge unrest and struggles that would follow inevitably from their allowing hundreds of thousands of deaths from COVID. This is the result of a fundamental push from the bottom up.

Once the pandemic and quarantine recedes, this crisis has the capacity to develop on the streets like the Gilets Jaunes movement in France. This is the last thing that the capitalist class want. The virus is not man-made but the public health crisis it has exposed was made by neoliberalism. This may well turn to anger and a working class that has again become conscious of its power. We on the left need to promote a correct programmatic perspective to point the working-class masses towards the need to take power and abolish the root cause of the neo-liberal attacks: capitalism itself.

Trotskyist Faction of Socialist Fight

We should be thankful for small mercies, or perhaps for lesser kinds of opportunism. In the aftermath of Gerry Downing’s capitulation to the heavily Zionist-influenced defeat of the Corbyn-movement and his betrayal of the uncompromising anti-Zionism that he publicly fought for in the last five years, Tony Greenstein has actually emerged somewhat to Downing’s left.[1]

In this article we use the term ‘centrist’ to describe the like of Greenstein and Downing. We should clarify that we are not using the term in the way it is commonly used in British left-wing politics these days, to mean right-wing, neo-liberal Blairite-type politics. Rather we are using it in the way Lenin and Trotsky used it, to describe those trends within the workers movement that vacillate between social reform and social revolution as a political programme. As Trotsky noted:

“A centrist occupies a position between an opportunist and a Marxist somewhat analogous to that which a petty bourgeois occupies between a capitalist and a proletarian: he kowtows before the first and has contempt for the second.”[2]

He went on to explain about the amorphousness and political diversity of centrist trends:

“One must understand first of all the most characteristic traits of modern centrism. That is not easy first, because centrism due to its organic amorphousness yields with difficulty to a positive definition: it is characterized to a much greater extent by what it lacks than by what it embraces, secondly, never has centrism yet played to such an extent as now with all the colours of the rainbow, because never yet have the ranks of the working class been in such ferment as at the present time. Political ferment, by the very essence of the term, means a realignment, a shift between two poles, Marxism and reformism; that is, the passing through the various stages of centrism.”[3]

It is not difficult for Greenstein, as a slightly different kind of centrist, to come out to the left of Gerry Downing, as Downing, in the aftermath of Boris Johnson’s election victory, embarked on his right-wing, pro-Zionist trajectory in opposition to politics that he had previously defended on national television in March 2016. Downing lacks Marxian arguments to defeat the orthodox Marxist politics SF had stood for since 2015, and so has been forced to embrace such Zionist thinkers as Alan Dershowitz, Dave Rich, Ron Rosenbaum, and more, to try to attain political substance.

Downing even embraced an anonymous Zionist troll who dubs himself ‘Sven Gøllӱ’ (Svengali), who had the honour of having a guest article on the stolen ‘Socialist Fight’ website itself. We note that this individual is very concerned to hide his real political pedigree, while praising Gerry Downing as someone who is prepared to re-think his ideas. He is very coy about who he really is. If he were any sort of a left-winger he would not hesitate to give us a run-down of his leftist associations, even pseudonymously. But he cannot. His style is familiar, as he confirms to an archetype of Zionist trolls.

He is most likely one of a stable of UK Zionist trolls whose most prolific is Ben Gidley, who has trolled the left for years under various flags of convenience such as ‘Bob From Brockley’, ‘The Soapy One’, and ‘Anti-Nazis United’ (which despite its name has targeted left-wingers, even black ones such as Jackie Walker). Some circumstantial details that he let slip point to Gidley likely being ‘Sven Gøllӱ’. But even if he is not, it is one of his cohorts from the UK Zionist stable.

As befitting someone who is rapidly retreating to the right, Downing’s factional campaign has involved not only the enlistment of Zionist ideologues to combat the left-wing of his own organisation, but also racist/Islamophobic abuse from some of Downing’s new cohorts against comrades in the Trotskyist Faction of SF, the majority of whom are from the Middle East/South Asia region.

Tony Greenstein, of course has more sense than to overtly associate himself with Nakba deniers, anonymous Zionist trolls, or the likes of the Community Security Trust (who he once dubbed the ‘Community Security Thugs’). In fact, in a way quite honourably, at the conclusion of his piece he comes to our defence against Downing’s more psychotic fascist-baiting rants, writing about Ian Donovan that:

“Despite his many sins Ian looks to the left not the right. It would be wrong to categorise him as a fascist, if only through guilt by association.”[4]

The ‘guilt-by-association’ he is talking about is Downing’s parroting of the propaganda of the Community Security Trust who published propaganda, reproduced wholesale on Facebook by Downing, which sought to brand the expatriate Israeli Jazz  musician Gilad Atzmon as a ‘fascist’. Greenstein distances himself from this polemic, as well he might, with the following statement about Atzmon:

“I disagree. Fascism is a specific political movement aimed at not only destroying working class organisations and the left but all democratic rights. It is the last resort of capitalism against the workers’ movement. GA certainly flirts with fascists and anti-Semites, neo-Nazis included but he has also flirted with the Left, including the SWP. He is, if anything, politically promiscuous. He reminds me of Christopher Hitchens, a contrarian who would argue positions for the outrage they would cause.

“I’m sure that GA, an accomplished jazz player, is well aware that jazz was considered Jewish inspired ‘nigger music’ in Nazi Germany. Listening to jazz was considered an act of rebellion by rebellious youth chafing at the boring monotone culture of the Nazis. GA also works happily with Jews, converses with them and has no personal antagonism to Jews as Jews. In other words whilst his ideas are without doubt anti-Semitic, on a personal level he is not an anti-Semite. Nor is there any reason to believe that he has given his support to, still less become a member of, a fascist organisation.”[5]

Personal vs ‘Political’ Racism: Centrist Sophistry

This formulation, that someone can be ‘politically’ anti-Semitic without being personally so, is an index of Tony Greenstein’s left centrism. Someone who promotes racist ideas cannot be non-racist. Greenstein is, more honestly than Gerry Downing, talking about political positions that he finds uncomfortable. Unlike Downing, he has the integrity to admit that the people he is denouncing as ‘anti-Semitic’ are not personally racist.

His comparison of Atzmon with Christopher Hitchens is wide of the mark, as Hitchens was a neocon supporter of imperialist wars, whereas Atzmon is an outspoken opponent of such neocon wars. Whatever Atzmon’s problems and illusions, they are polar opposites.

Greenstein’s distinction between ‘personal’ and ‘political’ ‘racism’ ties him up in a knot: he both accuses people of racism and exonerates them of that in the same sentence! Trotsky once said that centrism is ‘crystallised confusion’. Well you cannot get more confused than that. Tony Greenstein has invented something quite unique here: the non-racist racist. But this is nonsense: in the real world, racism is as racism does.

Gerry Downing when he was a Marxist and an anti-Zionist, did not believe in this bizarre, dualistic and self-contradictory concept. Now he has become a renegade from the consistent anti-Zionist politics he previously upheld, he still does not buy it. From the other side. But he has now decided that consistent anti-Zionism is ‘anti-Semitic’. In his mind, less nimble than Tony’s left-centrism, since to him we are ‘anti-Semitic’ therefore we must be personally racist.

But he has a problem. Our faction is majority non-white. It also includes the majority of the non-white comrades of SF, an organisation that was close to half non-white in its membership composition. Whereas his faction contains no non-whites; none have signed his factional statements. So Gerry has to put it about that our members are personally racist in some way, but that is rather difficult in a racist society where non-whites are subject to the most vicious racism. So the result has been a cacophony of abuse directed at our sole white comrade, comrade Donovan, seeking to mendaciously say he is a ‘white nationalist’. Somewhat contradictorily, he is also accused of being a pro-Muslim ‘communalist’ because of his membership of RESPECT in the 2000s. This complete nonsense cannot explain how comrade Donovan, as a ‘white nationalist’, can be in a majority non-white faction, or could have been an enthusiastic RESPECT member for several years.

No ‘white nationalist’ could possibly do such things, of course. So the bottom line of this nonsense is the other side of the self-contradictory nonsense accusations from Downing, the part about pro-Muslim ‘communalism’.  This has, not surprisingly, led to Islamophobic and racist abuse from some of Downing’s followers against supporters of our faction, and particularly against one of our non-white comrades of Middle Eastern origin.

Renegades and Islamophobia

This comrade was baldly accused of being in favour of murdering Jews in London synagogues by Gareth Martin, a racist bigot and Downing supporter. No such attack has happened and this sickening racist fantasy was pulled right out of the abuser’s posterior. Another of Downing’s defenders on Facebook, someone called Rob Lyons (apparently from North America) baited our comrade about people from his Middle Eastern ethnic background “beating their wives”: a classic reactionary slur and stereotype.

 This is no great surprise, as political Zionism is a racist ideology:  so is Islamophobia, and they are closely related. It is no surprise that some of those in and around a faction that makes copious use of Zionist ideologues like Dershowitz, Rich and ‘Sven Gøllӱ’ to argue its case, should have outright Islamophobes among them. There is no ‘separation’ between ‘political’ and ‘personal’ racism in the Downing faction: that faction has pulled in outright racists from outside the original SF, and none of its people are prepared to condemn the racism of Gareth Martin and Rob Lyons.

Racism is as racism does, and for attacking these bigots, our comrades, and comrade Donovan in particular, has implicitly, but unmistakably, been accused of ‘anti-white racism’ by Downing himself. This is itself a far-right slur usually found among white supremacists. So it seems that these people’s ranting about our alleged ‘white nationalism’ is an example of projection: a classic feature of political Zionism, where genocidal anti-Arab racists and ethnic cleansers project their attitudes onto their victims and intended victims.

Tony Greenstein might well be wary of this evolution to the right of Gerry Downing, which had its first manifestation at Communist University in 2019, when Downing acted independently of his Socialist Fight comrades in launching a rather odd attack on Tony for his expressed admiration for the Jewish philosopher Hannah Arendt, because of her long time relationship with the dilettante/academic philosopher Martin Heidegger, an opportunist who was a largely inactive member of Hitler’s party during the period of Hitler’s regime.  

Tony knows of what he speaks when he talks of ‘guilt by association’, as Downing denounced him as soft on Nazism on this occasion. This actually became an issue in the division in SF; maybe embarrassingly for Tony, the ‘anti-Semitic’ Trotskyist Faction condemned Downing’s unprincipled and personally motivated attempt at ‘revenge’ against him for Tony’s wrong-headed criticism of SF and Downing in particular, which in his degeneration he treated as a personal slight (to be avenged therefore) and not a political difference to be argued about.

What all this clarifies quite well is that what is being argued about is not racism. Tony Greenstein considers, apparently quite sincerely, that it is possible to be ‘anti-Semitic’ without being ‘personally’ racist. And Downing considers that ‘anti-Semitism’ is the ultimate evil, but has no problem with outright racist abuse of comrades from ethnic groups that his supporters do not like. Greenstein, no doubt, would find that abhorrent, though he does not actually like to say so. Maybe he considers it impolite to challenge Downing about such things?

A Discomfiting Theory

What he is most concerned, however, is captured in the headline of his piece: “Socialist Fight Drops Its Support for Ian Donovan’s Anti-Semitic Theories about a pan-national Jewish-Zionist Bourgeoisie – or does it?” Given that we have clarified above that Tony considers that ‘anti-Semitism’ has nothing to do with racism, that for him it is perfectly possible to be ‘anti-Semitic’ without holding any animus towards Jews as all, then it is clear that what is at stake here, is his own animus towards a theory. A theory that he finds objectionable even though he cannot argue – because he has too much integrity, or perhaps that he has too much concern for his own credibility – that the theory is racist. Through his effective de-fanging of the concept of anti-Semitism , he has therefore revealed that he has some other motive for anti-racism for objecting to that theory.

So let us examine some of the contradictions and non-sequiturs in his article that further expose his crystallised confusion on these matters. For instance, on the question of the ‘right’ of Labour Party members to support Israel, he writes:

“ID’s defence, if that is the right word, is that GD has become a Zionist because he doesn’t support expelling all Zionists from the Labour Party. Neither do I. I am in favour of disaffiliating or proscribing Zionist organisations such as Labour Friends of Israel and Jewish Labour Movement not individuals per se, although clearly Zionist apparatchiks and propagandists should be shown the door.”[6]

It is reasonable to wonder if Tony would be so indulgent of members of the Labour Party, on an individual level, supporting other openly racist states. Such as Nazi Germany, perhaps? It is very difficult to find cases of genuine anti-Semitism in the Labour Party, certainly on the left, but there have been a few cases of right-wingers who have made pro-Hitler comments. Such views, along with those approving apartheid and colonialism, are rightly anathema in Labour. Why should support for Israel be any different to support for Hitler? Downing’s indulgence of supporters of Israel does not actually make him a Zionist, but the double standard involved from both Tony and Downing is a capitulation to Zionism to a lesser degree.

The contradiction in Tony’s article is shown when he writes that our views, as expressed in a recent letter in the Weekly Worker, are

“… an appalling apologia for GA’s anti-Semitism, including his comments questioning the Holocaust.”[7]

But Tony himself in his own terms could be said to have ‘apologised’ for Atzmon’s supposed ‘anti-Semitism’ when he wrote that Atzmon “works happily with Jews, converses with them and has no personal antagonism to Jews as Jews.” But ‘hostility to Jews as Jews’ is the definition of anti-Semitism that Greenstein endorses, the Klug definition. So surely his remarks are also an ‘apologia’ for Atzmon!

Arab and Jewish ‘anti-Semitism’

This is where Greenstein’s contradictions get him really bogged down. He considers our inclusion of Atzmon’s sometimes-expressed sceptical views about aspects of the Nazi holocaust in the same category as Arab and other third-world ‘holocaust denial’ to constitute this supposed ‘apologia’. But this is simply illogical. He writes that Atzmon’s scepticism:

“has nothing in common with Arab or third world Holocaust denial. Yes because Zionism uses the Holocaust as a weapon many Arabs therefore query the weapon itself rather than the use made of it. But Atzmon comes from the oppressor people. His ideas are from European neo-Nazis.”[8]

So Atzmon’s questioning – he questions aspects of it but does not actually deny – the Holocaust has nothing in common with Gamal Abdul Nasser’s 1964 speech when he condemned “the lie of the Six Million”? Or has nothing in common with Iranian President Ahmadinejad’s organisation of conferences in Iran to debate the truth or otherwise of the Nazi holocaust, which coincided pretty much with the period – around 2005, when Atzmon first became a political factor at SWP events associated with the Iraq anti-war movement? Or they have nothing in common with the decades-long publication by the Ba’athist Syrian regime, of copious quantities of Nazi literature as part of an imagined counter-thrust against Israel? Or Hamas’ original charter, now amended for ‘respectability’ which endorses the Protocols of the Elders of Zion?

In formal ideological terms, there is no way to separate ‘Arab or third world holocaust denial’ from neo-Nazi holocaust denial, as Greenstein attempts to do. The only way to separate it is to take account of the material circumstances that drive it: it is not an ideology of German imperialism but that of oppressed peoples trying to hit back at their oppressors, the Jewish state/Zionist imperialism, and their ‘democratic’ imperialist allies. In the absence of an authoritative revolutionary, communist movement able to fight their oppressors along a class axis, oppressed peoples under bourgeois leadership look for any weapon they can find to fight these oppressors.

In this context Atzmon’s views are as much an organic outgrowth of the politics of the Middle East as all the above. However they are qualitatively milder, and are underpinned by a theory of Jewish identity that does not condemn all Jews.

Atzmon’s theory of three categories of Jews: the born-Jewish: the religious, and those who regard their Jewishness as their most important political attribute, only regards the third as problematic and does not condemn all Jews.[9] That theoretical perspective drives everything he says: he does not condemn all Jews and therefore cannot be said to be anti-Semitic. This is why as Greenstein points out, Atzmon “works happily with Jews, converses with them and has no personal antagonism to Jews as Jews”. That behaviour flows from his theory.

His ‘third category’ also appears to more or less coincide with the concept of Jewish chauvinism, which genuine Marxists oppose just as much as any other kind of racism or ethnic chauvinism, and so whatever reservations we have about Atzmon’s idealism, this aspect of his critique of what he calls ‘Jewishness’ is progressive. This is also why some on the Jewish left, including to a degree Tony, do not like his views as they think that some kinds of Jewish chauvinism are excusable, or deniable.

Greenstein’s statement that Atzmon comes “from the oppressor people” is moralism. He has done as much as is humanly possible to reject his origin in the oppressor people, renouncing his Israeli citizenship, getting his whole family out of Israel including his surviving parent, publicly stating that he will not return to that country until Palestine is liberated from the Israeli regime. He publicly identifies as a “Hebrew-speaking Palestinian”.  Short of joining a Palestinian armed–struggle group, which may be unwise, there is little else that anyone from this oppressor people can possibly to do reject their origins.

In this context, to say that his scepticism about the Nazi genocide does not flow from his sympathy and empathy with similar sentiments among the Arab masses with whom he obviously identifies is simply a denial of reality.  Atzmon is not unique, he is just the most prominent of an entire ‘fringe’ layer of Jewish defectors and ‘renegades’ who identify in similar ways with the Arab masses – and some of their illusions.

While Israel was founded mainly by Ashkenazi Jews who are thus the primary oppressors of the Palestinians, the Ashkenazi Jews were also the main victims of the Shoah – so in a way as well being born of the oppressor in Israel, Atzmon is also a descendant of those oppressed by Hitler. This makes his mistaken scepticism about aspects of the Nazi holocaust quite noble in its underlying motive, given that in Israel the exploitation of that past oppression is a primary tool for brainwashing the Jewish population to support and commit atrocities against the Palestinians.

Unfortunately Tony’s misrepresentation of Atzmon’s obvious motives on this question is somewhat less than noble. It is driven by an element of ethnic politics in his political makeup that, despite his numerous progressive and often very insightful criticisms of Zionist racism and even of softer elements of the Jewish left, he has never fully broken from.

Tony’s crystallised confusion is shown when he criticises the note accompanying Downing’s interview with Atzmon where GD said of Atzmon that ‘I do not agree he is either racist or anti-Semitic.’. But putting aside the ludicrous notion that a non-racist person can be a racist political ideologue, Greenstein said exactly the same thing of Atzmon when he wrote that Atzmon: “works happily with Jews, converses with them and has no personal antagonism to Jews as Jews… on a personal level he is not an anti-Semite”.

In other words, out of Tony Greenstein’s own mouth, this dispute is not about racism.  It is about political ideas that he finds objectionable not because he believes that those who advocate them are racist, but that raise issues that he finds discomforting. He cannot deal with our orthodox Marxist position on the Jewish-Zionist bourgeoisie without mangling and distorting it.

Greenstein and Communalism

This is shown by the obvious distortion of our position on the Jews as a putative oppressor people, oppressing the Palestinian Arabs. Tony seems incapable of understanding plain English on this. He quotes our words on this pretty much in full but does not understand them:

“Jews are a ‘people, who, insofar as they act in a collective manner under a quasi-nationalist leadership today, act as oppressors of another people, namely Arabs’.” (emphasis added).[10]

He simply does not understand the significance of the words emphasised when he then turns around and accuses us of this:

 “Yet during the debate on whether or not LAW should exclude SF ID denied that they had described the Jews as an ‘oppressor people’ which suggests that his ‘materialist’ analysis of what he calls ‘the Jewish Question’ is indefensible.”[11]

But there is no contradiction here. For what was alleged (by Moshe Machover) in that discussion is that this characterisation of Jews under Zionist communal leadership encompassed every single Jew on the planet. That was what was denied, not that Jews insofar as they act under Zionist leadership oppress the Arab people of Palestine. In other words, membership of this oppressor group for Jews in the diaspora is a conscious ideological choice.

Those Jews who choose to act under Zionist leadership and fight to mobilise other imperialist forces to support oppressive, and indeed genocidal, policies and actions, are part of a population that participates in the oppression of the Arabs: an oppressor population in other words.  Those who refuse to do so out of anti-racist principle effectively opt out of that oppressor population and are not part of it. This is actually why communal politics is such a powerful presence in the Jewish population today and those who dissent are treated by mainstream Jewish organisations not as simply a dissenting minority with the ‘Jewish community’, but as traitors and enemies. And this is what Tony fears most of all. He fears to finally burn his bridges with this communalist ‘community’.

It is an expression of Jewish communalism, not anti-racism, when Tony writes:

“It is to be welcomed that Gerry now repudiates use of the term, ‘the world ‘Jewish-Zionist bourgeoisie’’ and the whole notion of a Jewish-Zionist imperialist vanguard as anti-Semitic tropes.’ The idea that there is a Jewish sub-set of the ruling class, still less a pan national Jewish bourgeoisie is deeply anti-Semitic and reminiscent of Nazi  world Jewish conspiracy theories. They have no place in a socialist let alone Marxist group.”[12]

This is an attack on Marxism, not racism. First of all the term “the world ‘Jewish-Zionist bourgeoisie’” is a falsification invented by Downing to justify his renegacy. It does not appear in any SF or related documents. This phenomenon is largely confined to Western Europe and North America; it is not a world-wide phenomenon. We defined it as ‘pan-imperialist’ (and ‘pan-national’ in a context that made clear that this means pan-imperialist), but there is one imperialist power that obviously does not have a contingent from this caste and is largely irrelevant to it: Japan.

Tony’s criticism above is communalist, anti-communist and an apologia for political Zionism in its international dimension insofar as it aims to protect a specific layer of the imperialist bourgeoisie against materialist, Marxist criticism.

He makes explicit his defence of wealthy, Zionist-communalist Jews against left-wing criticism when he says:

“ID explains support for Israel by the West as being on account of ‘Jewish overrepresentation in the US and other ruling classes.’ In other words Jews form an ethnic lobby”[13]

The non-sequitur in this is where Tony says that this means that “Jews” (i.e. in general) represent an ethnic lobby. But this is just feeble as any literate person reading the above sentence can see that it was referring to a Jewish section of the ruling class, ie. a class-based subset of Jews. Furthermore, our formulation about the ‘Jewish–Zionist bourgeoisie’ makes it very clear that we are only talking about that subset of the Jewish bourgeoisie that are actually Zionist.

Non-Zionist Jewish bourgeois are not part of the Jewish-Zionist bourgeois caste. For instance there is no reason to include George Soros in the J-Z caste as he does not seem to support Israeli crimes and has been virulently denounced by Netanyahu for his liberal political projects. We do not endorse Soros’ projects for class reasons due to our hostility to the liberal bourgeoisie in general, but our criticism of this is separate to our criticism of the J-Z caste.

So far from referring to all Jews, our allegation of ethnic lobbying is directed against a large politically-defined subset of a class-based subset of Jews, not against all Jews. Tony is not illiterate: he hopes the reader will not notice this evasion, or perhaps choose to ignore it perhaps out of a feeling of guilt for the Nazi holocaust, etc.

Tony’s defence of Jewish-Zionist chauvinist ethnic politics goes further when he quotes and denounces a Socialist Fight article that answered the following key question:

“‘Does it mean that we specifically target Jewish capital?’ Answer: Not all Jewish capital. But we do want to expose that a specific part of Jewish capital has an ethnocentric interest in the dispossession of Palestinians.”[14]

Greenstein says of our answer:

“Targeting Jewish capitalists was the anti-capitalism of the Brownshirts. It was what the Nazis and anti-Semitic movements in Europe did.”[15]

This equation with Nazism of criticism of bourgeois like Sheldon Adelson and Haim Saban, to give two concrete examples, who directly fund politicians on the basis of their support for the genocidal oppression of the Palestinians, is a disgusting apologia for this layer of racist bourgeois. Nazi propaganda in Weimar Germany made out that Jewish capitalists were somehow worse than non-Jewish in their exploitation of the German working class, an assertion that was based on nationalist myth and was flatly untrue. There was no difference in material interest between Jewish and non-Jewish bourgeois vis-à-vis the German working class.

But there is a difference of material interest between Jewish and non-Jewish bourgeois in the US and other imperialist countries in terms of the oppression of the Palestinians. This is due to Israel’s racist Law of Return, which gives all Jews born overseas the right to Israeli citizenship. Since Israel is a bourgeois state, which like all bourgeois states in reality belongs to its bourgeoisie, and an imperialist bourgeois state at that, this gives Jewish bourgeois in the diaspora a material interest in the Israeli bourgeois state.

This fits together perfectly with the ideology of political Zionism, that Jews born abroad are exiles whose real home is the Jewish state.  This racist law was consciously designed for this purpose: to create a layer of the overseas imperialist bourgeoisie that sees Israel, as well as their state of origin, as ‘their’ bourgeois-imperialist state. It has done this very effectively, as more advanced layers of the Jewish left than represented by Greenstein have begun to acknowledge.

Greenstein’s equation of criticism of the pro-Israel Jewish-Zionist bourgeois caste with Nazi agitation against Jewish bourgeois in the Weimar Republic is an attack on Marxism, not anti-Semitism, and similar to the propaganda of the Stalin regime in the 1930s that critics of the anti-Soviet bureaucracy were agents of Hitler. In the 1930s this was done in defence of the Stalinist bureaucratic caste that arose during the degeneration of the first workers state against Marxist criticism.

When gatekeepers like Greenstein, or Gerry Downing’s associate Dov Winter, make such amalgams they are defending the Jewish-Zionist bourgeois caste against criticism from Marxist internationalists. They are thus acting as gatekeepers; political agents of that bourgeois caste, within the workers movement, and their behaviour is a Jewish variant of class collaboration and mutatis mutandis, what Daniel DeLeon said about labour misleaders in general, that they are “labour lieutenants of the capitalist caste”. Such gatekeepers today act as labour lieutenants of the Jewish-Zionist bourgeois caste.

Finkelstein acknowledges reality

Regarding the social reality of this, we are far from the only left-wing people who have noticed the existence of a distinct, powerful layer of super-rich Jewish bourgeois who promote the interests of Israel and play a crucial role in the oppression of the Palestinians. More advanced sections of the Jewish left than Tony Greenstein have analysed and categorised this to the extent that it could be said that in denying this crucial element of social reality, Greenstein is engaged in a real process of denial of one of the most crucial mechanisms of the oppression of the Palestinians, and thus acting in favour of their oppressors.

For instance Norman Finkelstein, in his August 2018 essay Corbyn Mania, repeated and enhanced the observations that comrade Donovan made about the overrepresentation of Jewish bourgeois in the ruling classes of Western countries as the material basis that allows Zionist campaigns to destroy politicians, such as Jeremy Corbyn, who attempt in some way to stand up for Palestinian rights:

“The three richest Brits are Jewish. Jews comprise only .5 percent of the population but fully 20 percent of the 100 richest Brits.  Relative both to the general population and to other ethno-religious groups, British Jews are in the aggregate disproportionately wealthy, educated, and professionally successful. These data track closely with the picture elsewhere. Jews comprise only 2 percent of the US population but fully 30 percent of the 100 richest Americans, while Jews enjoy the highest household income among religious groups. Jews comprise less than .2 percent of the world’s population but, of the world’s 200 richest people, fully 20 percent are Jewish.”[16]

It is also a fact that Norman when he wrote this article was familiar with our position and appears to have been influenced by us, having been the speaker at the CPGB’s Communist University event in 2016, when a heated exchange took place involving comrade Donovan, Tony Greenstein and others. Finkelstein defended our right to speak when we were shouted down for making similar points and then responded at length on the role of ethnic lobbying and Jewish ethnic chauvinism in American politics, and was himself heckled considerably, including by Tony Greenstein.

Finkelstein goes on to elaborate on the relevance of this for questions related to the Middle East in American and British politics. He links it explicitly to the Israeli campaign against Obama’s Iran deal, and the 30 or so standing ovations Netanyahu received from US lawmakers at a joint session of the US Congress in 2015, and to the witchhunt against supporters of Jeremy Corbyn in the Labour Party:

“The Israel-based Jewish People Policy Planning Institute rhapsodizes that ‘The Jewish People today is at a historical zenith of wealth creation’ and ‘has never been as powerful as now.’ It is certainly legitimate to query the amplitude of this political power and whether it has been exaggerated, but it cannot be right to deny (or suppress) critical socioeconomic facts. When virtually every member of the US Congress acts like a broken Jack-in-the-Box, as they give an Israeli head of state, who has barged into the Capitol in brazen and obnoxious defiance of the sitting US president, one standing ovation after another, surely it is fair to ask: What the hell is going on here? Were it not for the outsized power of British Jews, it’s hard to conceive that British society would be interminably chasing after a hobgoblin.”[17]

The ‘hobgoblin’ being the campaign of phoney allegations of ‘anti-Semitism’ against Jeremy Corbyn and his supporters in the Labour Party, by Zionists motivated by hatred of the Corbynite left because of their sympathy for the Palestinians.

Finkelstein also echoes the point from our theses about the ‘vanguard’ role of Jewish-Zionist bourgeois under capitalism today. He does so by making this astute observation about the changing social mores of the US bourgeoisie toward their Jewish bourgeois brethren:

“Not only is it no longer a social liability to be Jewish, it even carries social cachet. Whereas it once was a step up for a Jew to marry into a ruling elite family, it now appears to be a step up for the ruling elite to marry into a Jewish family. Isn’t it a straw in the wind that both President Bill Clinton’s pride and joy Chelsea and President Donald Trump’s pride and joy Ivanka married Jews?”[18]

This begs the question: why is it that the social hierarchy among the bourgeoisie appears to have been reversed, so whereas once Jews ‘married up’ into the non-Jewish bourgeoisie, now it is increasingly seen as being the other way round, that non-Jews are ‘marrying up’ into the Jewish bourgeoisie?

This is obviously a result of the enormous shift in the social position of Jews since WWII and the days of the dominance of anti-Semitism. In the days of widespread bourgeois anti-Semitism, even Jewish bourgeois were regarded with suspicion among the wider bourgeoisie as potential subversives due to the vanguard role that many Jewish workers and intellectuals played in the socialist and communist movement. ‘Country club discrimination’ against Jewish bourgeois was rife among wealthy gentiles.

Today we have a different situation. We have seen the rise of political Zionism to dominance among Jews as a right-wing, bourgeois movement, and the important role that prominent Jewish-Zionist bourgeois such as Friedman, Kissinger, Sherman, Joseph, Ayn Rand etc. played in neo-liberalism, which many of the bourgeoisie in general see as the creed that saved capitalism itself. As a result, there has arisen among the bourgeoisie in the Western countries in particular a deference to the Jewish bourgeoisie as a kind of vanguard, a particularly class conscious layer of their own class. A kind of mirror image of the role that Jews such as Marx, Trotsky, Luxemburg once played in the revolutionary working class movement.

This is a huge change in bourgeois class consciousness and explains the huge shift from the situation before WWII where anti-Semitism was used to inflict defeats on the working class movement. Today, bourgeois philo-Semitism and pro-Zionist racism has, as with the case of Labour and Corbyn, been used likewise to inflict defeats on the workers movement, a shift that the most advanced elements of the left have not yet caught up with and theorised properly.

Tony complains that our position amounts to saying that “the ‘Jewish bourgeoisie’ were the guardians of the rest of the capitalist class”. Yet he provides no explanation for this phenomenon, or why opposing ‘left anti-Semitism’ has become the fake ‘anti-racism’ of the bourgeoisie. He says this with horror even though he has been compelled to acknowledge the power of Finkelstein’s points on the gentile bourgeoisie ‘marrying up’. But he flinches from a materialist explanation of the bourgeoisie’s current philo-Semitic cult. 

In this regard Tony Greenstein’s fulminations against our Theses represent not advanced, vanguard working class politics, but political backwardness, communalism, and capitulation to a part of the bourgeoisie whom he and others with similar views identify with politically to a degree. Others on the Jewish left, not only Finkelstein, are both more honest and more in touch with social reality.

Mondoweiss, Jews and the Israel Lobby

Phil Weiss, the Jewish socialist who runs Mondoweiss, which is the most prominent Jewish left-wing socialist blog in the United States, does not mince words when it comes to the role of Jewish bourgeois in promoting the most despicable hard-line racist US policies towards the Palestinians. For instance, he writes scathingly of the role of Sheldon Adelson in promoting Trump:

“For 20 years Sheldon Adelson has been pouring money into Republican politics to prevent the establishment of a Palestinian state, and he has succeeded. Trump has proved to be Adelson’s ‘perfect little puppet’ (to quote the president on Adelson’s former favorite in 2015), giving the casino mogul everything on his wish list, from moving the embassy to Jerusalem to recognizing the Golan annexation to tearing up the Iran deal. ‘A huge check from Sheldon Adelson’ and winning Jewish votes in Florida, is how Thomas Friedman explained Trump’s actions a few weeks ago. Adelson has more power than the Secretary of State, writes Tim Egan of the Times.”[19]

It is worth noting that Gerry Downing, now he has capitulated to Zionism, has denounced Phil Weiss in our internal discussions as a ‘Jewish conspiracy’ theorist for some of his views on these questions. However Tony Greenstein regularly writes articles that are published by Mondoweiss.

Weiss also makes mincemeat of the standard argument made by ‘left’ apologists for Jewish ethnic politics and lobbying that the real strength of the Israel lobby comes from Christian Zionists and Evangelicals, not Jewish bourgeois. This has been a standard argument from Tony Greenstein in the past against our attacks on the Israel lobby as centrally driven by specifically Jewish chauvinism:

“Some say Trump does all this for the evangelical vote. ‘A cynical play for evangelicals,’ and not Jews, David Rothkopf said of the settlements reversal. This may be comforting but it’s not true. If the settlements were such a winner for evangelicals, Trump would have announced the change two weeks earlier, before the Kentucky and Louisiana governor’s elections– when he pulled out all stops to win. Read Trump’s desperate speeches to rallies in those states to try and get Republican candidates to victory. In each speech he mentions Israel/Jerusalem once, in a boilerplate line. Compare it to adoption, abortion, health care, the military — where Trump goes on and on. The fact is that Christian evangelicals don’t really care that much about Israel, as a former Israeli consul in California, pointed out a year ago:

 “’Yes on paper there are 70 million evangelical Christians in America. How many truly are interested in the settlements and this and that? The numbers are not very high. The number of evangelical Christians who are interested in our political conversation is very very small.’”[20]

And Weiss points out the bipartisan nature of this ethnic lobbying, it is not confined to the Republicans and Adelson, but it is a social phenomenon.

 “Let’s be clear, selling out US policy on Israel to donors did not start with Trump and Republicans. Hillary Clinton pandered to pro-Israel contributors in her 2016 campaign. She attacked the boycott movement so as to please Haim Saban and other donors, and promised to take the U.S.-Israel relationship to ‘the next level,’ so as to change the script from the Obama years– when we only gave Israel 3.8 billion a year plus.”

[…]

“Sheldon Adelson has plenty of counterparts in the Democratic Party. I was in the audience in Cairo in 2009 when Obama, who had not yet visited Israel, thrillingly declared to the Muslim world that the settlements must end. The president had J Street at his back. Then he and J Street folded under political pressure, including a Netanyahu speech to Congress, defying Obama on settlements, when the multiple standing ovations were ‘bought and paid for by the Israel lobby,’ as Tom Friedman said.

 “So the settlements went on, and Obama broke his word and vetoed an anti-settlements resolution at the U.N. ‘just as the 2012 presidential campaign cycle was cranking up,’ to quote Ben Rhodes.”[21]

And he generalises this from a historical perspective:

“The Israel lobby, pro-Israel influencers, mostly Jewish, have been a factor in our political life since Harry Truman folded on his own opposition to a Jewish state in part because he needed $100,000 from political backers Abe Feinberg and Ed Kaufmann – a huge sum in 1948–for a whistlestop campaign trip through the midwest when his campaign was broke. ‘Democrats had to worry not just about the Jewish vote, but also about fundraising from wealthy Jewish contributors,’ John Judis wrote in his book Genesis.”

 “I bore myself repeating these items. (And God help the reader!) But I have to because most observers accept the antisemitism redlines echoed lately by Bernie Sanders: you are not to speak of an outsize Jewish role in politics. So few write about the Israel lobby, though they know it to be a significant force.”

[…]

“Israel lobbyists themselves extol Jewish political power in the U.S. as Israel’s lifeline for money and arms and diplomatic protection. ‘I have no qualms about pointing out that the American Jewish community is almost certainly the most influential minority community in the history of the U.S., and possibly in the history of the world,’ says Michael Koplow of the Israel Policy Forum. ‘American Jews have worked hard to make it so, and have built a network of outward-facing institutions that protect this privileged position.’ While Times opinion editor Bari Weiss warns in her new book that the left wing of the Democratic Party is ‘actively hostile to Jewish power.’ Among progressives, she writes, ‘the very idea of Jewish power must be abjured.’[22]

The ‘outsize’ Jewish role in politics, say both Norman Finkelstein and Phil Weiss, who are among the most advanced and far-sighted elements on the US Jewish left, centred on the ‘outsize’ influence of the wealth of bourgeois Zionist Jews, due to their ‘outsize’ numerical representation relative to the size of the Jewish population itself in the Western countries and particularly the United States. This is fundamentally the same explanation as our own for the power of the Israel lobby: the overrepresentation of Jewish bourgeois with Zionist politics among the Western ruling classes relative to the size of the Jewish populations within those countries. If this is an anti-Semitic thesis then both Norman Finkelstein and Phil Weiss are anti-Semitic. They are certainly in advance of anyone we have so far encountered on the Jewish left in Britain.

Phil Weiss advances a hypothesis on what would have happened if there had not been a powerful Jewish-Zionist bourgeois lobby in Western countries able to powerfully distort the ‘normal’ functioning of these imperialist states:

“This is not just a domestic political question, it’s a foreign policy problem. The Israel lobby is the root cause of the Israel Palestine conflict.

“Consider the two other main causes of the conflict. 1, Israeli settlement/colonialism (or in Zionist terms, the effort to liberate European Jewry from persecution by establishing a Jewish homeland in historical Palestine). 2, Palestinian resistance to 1. Neither of these historical forces would still be a source of serious conflict 71 years after Israel’s establishment were it not for the lobby. Without the blind support of the United States, Israel would have made a deal a long time ago. The country would have followed through on the historic Palestinian concession of 1988 followed by the Arab Peace Initiative of 2001, and accepted partition of the land on highly favorable terms (Israel gets 78 percent). Without U.S. support, Israel would have been internationally isolated and would have grabbed the deal.”[23]

This has certain liberal-reformist implications and perhaps it is a sign that maybe Phil Weiss is not such a radical opponent of Zionism as he appears to be. Such a deal, if it had been consummated, would have resembled the Irish ‘peace process’, or the South African peace deal between the apartheid regime and the African National Congress, that brought to power Nelson Mandela. Both of these represented demobilisations of struggles against oppression and the buying off of those struggles for something that preserved capitalism and has since proved fundamentally rotten.

Such deals are generally in the interest of imperialism and a rational expression of how it seek to demobilise national liberation struggles that pose the question of permanent revolution where such struggles threaten capitalist-imperialist stability. Phil Weiss is correct that the reason why, instead of such a ‘solution’ being brokered, a genocidal policy towards the Palestinians has been adopted by US imperialism, not without its hesitations and vacillations, but clear nevertheless, is because of the Israel lobby, or as revolutionary Marxists call it, the Jewish-Zionist bourgeois caste. Phil Weiss believes that its days are numbered because of the growing disillusionment of younger Jews in the US with Israel and its crimes. This may well be an illusion, because it does not really address the power of capitalist property among a powerful minority of Zionist Jews. It may well be that the Jewish-Zionist lobby proves more durable than Weiss believes.  But that remains to be proven in practical struggle.

Centrism: Anti-Zionist in words, pro-Zionist in Deeds

Greenstein also comes to the defence of Zionism in other ways. He refutes the idea that Zionism is an independent force in world politics by a crude distortion of history, which is easy to expose. He writes that our Theses:

“..argued that what is distinctive about Israel is that unlike other settler colonial states ‘Israel has no ‘mother country’ because it was populated by part of the Jewish population from several countries.’ This is one of GA’s key argument as to why Israel’s character owes nothing to its being a settler colonial state but to the fact that it is a Jewish state. And it is the Jewishness that most interests GA.

It is of course a bogus argument. South Africa’s Boers had no mother country either. Nor did the American colonists once they had rebelled. Palestine had British imperialism as its sponsor.  What distinguishes settler colonialism is not who sponsors it but what the settlers do.  It is the political economy of settler colonialism which matters.  Do the settlers depend on exploitation of the indigenous labour or do they want to exclude it?”[24]

Once again, we see crude denial of reality and history. It is very clear that the original Boer (Dutch) settlers in South Africa had their origin in the Dutch Cape Colony. A simple search on Wikipedia reveals the truth about the origins of the Boers:

“The Cape Colony (Dutch: Kaapkolonie) was a Dutch East India Company colony in Southern Africa, centered on the Cape of Good Hope, whence it derived its name. The original colony and its successive states that the colony was incorporated into occupied much of modern South Africa. Between 1652 and 1691 a Commandment, and between 1691 and 1795 a Governorate of the Dutch East India Company. Jan van Riebeeck established the colony as a re-supply and layover port for vessels of the Dutch East India Company trading with Asia.[2] The Cape came under Dutch rule from 1652 to 1795 and again from 1803 to 1806.[3] Much to the dismay of the shareholders of the Dutch East India Company, who focused primarily on making profits from the Asian trade, the colony rapidly expanded into a settler colony in the years after its founding.”[25]

So far from the Boers not having a ‘mother country’, the Cape was ruled by Holland for approximately 150 years. That is classic colonialism.  Part of the Dutch population, along with some others, such as French Protestant refugees, migrated to take over an African territory. The Anglo-Saxon population of the North American colonies also clearly have their origin as a population mainly from the British ‘mother country’, likewise over a similar period of colonisation of over 150 years prior to the rebellion of the colonists consummated in 1776 and the War of Independence. It is clear however that Israel was different in some considerable ways as the Zionist movement did not originate in the British colonial power that took over Palestine in 1917. The Balfour Declaration, also in 1917, was a unique event in that the British colonial power promised Palestine as a ‘national home’ to a third party movement and population most of whom did not come from the ‘mother country’ at all.

 Even though the Balfour Declaration was addressed to the leading British Rothschild, this was in his capacity as a representative of Zionism as an international movement. This was not a migration of part of the British population to Palestine: the number of British Jews who went there was negligible. And it is well known that the leaders of the Zionist movement sought sponsorship from others, including the German Kaiser, the Russian Tsarist anti-Semite minister Von Phleve, and the Ottoman Sultan, among others, before the British. All these facts are so well known that Tony Greenstein insults the intelligence of his readers in pretending that Zionism was not an independent colonising movement that only sought sponsorship for its own aims, a quid-pro-quo, with other colonial powers.

This is so well-known that even others on the Jewish left who are really no more radical than Tony have been compelled to acknowledge the facts. For instance, Moshe Machover wrote that:

“In the ‘classical’ pattern of exclusionary colonisation, a European power, having invaded and taken possession of a territory, would encourage its own nationals to settle there under its military and political protection. These first settlers would be joined by many others from the mother country as well as from other European countries, and within a relatively short time the indigenous people would not only be dispossessed, but the survivors (if any) numerically overwhelmed and reduced to small, fragmented minorities.

In Palestine things proceeded quite differently. The settlers were not nationals of a mother country in possession of the coveted land; so from the very start the Zionist movement was seeking a surrogate mother – an imperial power that would dominate the region and promote the Zionist project in exchange for services rendered: forming “part of the rampart of Europe against Asia, an outpost of civilisation against barbarism”, as the movement’s founder put it.”[26]

So if Greenstein dictates that anyone who acknowledges historical facts on this question is in some way ‘politically’ anti-Semitic, then rightly he should also be denouncing Machover in the same way.  This petty falsification of history may well be because Greenstein himself, having internalised the absurd idea that a Jewish person can become an ‘anti-Semitic’ ideologue, fears being branded in that way himself, and thus resorts to this kind of petty attempt to obfuscate history to avoid being branded as an outright enemy by the powers that be in the Jewish establishment.

That is also involved in another complaint of his, viz. that:

“Socialist Fight accused the CPGB of having engaged in the ‘indulgence of Jewish sensibilities” as if all Jews have the same sensibilities. It is a statement which could have been taken from an overtly anti-Semitic publication.”[27]

This is incredibly precious. Of course, by ‘Jewish sensibilities’ is meant the sensibilities of the mainstream of Jewish political life. That is exactly what Greenstein is doing in the pandering to the idea that Jews are collectively innocent in his distortion of history just described.

He is denying that Zionism is an independent, predatory colonising force in its own right, which seeks to manoeuvre between the Great Powers for its own ends, and basically absolving the Jewish-Zionists of any crimes of their own. Apparently all their crimes were committed on behalf of some other force, Britain or the US, and they are thus absolved of real historical responsibility.

This is pandering to mainstream Jewish sensibilities, i.e. to Jewish chauvinism, as under capitalism the consciousness of the mainstream of this population, as with many others, is chauvinist and indeed racist, the racism being mainly against Arabs.

And there are more elements of apologia when Greenstein says:

“In Why Marxists must address the Jewish Question concretely today ID wrote that ‘Zionism is a Jewish nationalist-communalist project’ which is not true. It became an ethno-nationalist movement in Palestine/Israel but originally it was a separatist reaction to anti-Semitism. After all Poalei Zion in Russia joined the Bolsheviks.”[28]

The evasiveness and two-faced nature of centrism is clear here. Read it carefully : Greenstein admits that Zionism is, as we say, a ‘Jewish nationalist-communalist movement’. Yet he contradicts that on the basis that ‘originally’ it was merely a ‘separatist’ response to anti-Semitism. Presumably then, ‘originally’ it did not seek to take territory off another people, the aim that more than any other marks out its communalism. But of course it did: the clue is in the name: “Zionism” after Mount Zion in Jerusalem. The fact that a leftist part of Labour Zionism broke with communalism under the impact of the Russian Revolution and joined the Bolsheviks does not for one moment negate the communalist character of the Zionist movement. Once again, we have an apologia.

Greenstein’s anti-Left Witchhunts

Greenstein excuses his support for exclusionism against Socialist Fight on the basis of this anti-communist ‘criticism’ of our ‘left anti-Semitism’ and purports to laugh at the idea that “Marx and Trotsky would have approved” of our politics today. He also complains bitterly against our allegation that the campaign that part of the Jewish left, led by him, waged against the Socialist Workers Party for engaging with and hosting Atzmon from 2005-2010 was a communalist, anti-communist, and anti-left witchhunt. But the facts bear this out: the period in the 2000s was an unusually left-wing period in the SWP’s history. As we pointed out recently:

“Now under Alex Callinicos the SWP have overcome their more left-wing period under the leadership of John Rees and Lindsey German during the Iraq War period, where they blocked with George Galloway in RESPECT, loudly proclaimed their anti-Zionism, hosted Gilad Atzmon at Marxism, and their members occasionally engaged in fisticuffs with the pro-Zionist, pro-imperialist Alliance for Workers Liberty. Now instead under Callinicos the SWP insist on the presence of ‘Friends of Israel’ in their ‘Stand up to Racism’ front group events and strong-arm Palestinian supporters who protest. This is a major move to the right by the SWP.”[29]

It is perfectly clear that the capitulation of the SWP to the campaign waged by Greenstein and his fellow left communalists against their engagement with Atzmon was a key episode in their move to the right from their left-wing bulge in the Iraq war period. In a way the exclusion of Socialist Fight was a smaller-scale version of the witchhunt against the SWP, which was waged by Greenstein in a bloc with Hope Not Hate, the Alliance for Workers Liberty, and all kinds of forces who are distinguished by the fact that in the more recent period they have been part of the witchhunt against the Corbynite left in Labour.

Just as in the Palestine Solidarity Campaign (PSC) Greenstein supported the witchhunt against Palestinian activists who were sympathetic to Atzmon waged by Socialist Action, fake-left opportunist reformists par excellence. The result of this was that Socialist Action consolidated their hold over PSC. Now Greenstein complains bitterly about the pro-Zionist capitulation of the PSC leadership to the likes of Emily Thornberry, of Labour Friends of Israel, and similar enemies of the Palestinian people.

Now as part of their bringing the Labour Party’s Zionist witchhunt into PSC, the Zionist camp-followers of Socialist Action have engineered the expulsion of Ian Donovan and Gerry Downing from PSC. Will Greenstein do anything about this? That is very unlikely. As confronted with a point-blank choice between consistently anti-Zionist revolutionary Trotskyists, and flagrant collaborators with Zionism, he will most likely support the collaborators with Zionism every time.

There are so many examples of Greenstein’s anti-Marxist capitulations, he really does fit in with the definition of centrism put forward by Trotsky referred to earlier. The closest to a formal definition of this is the formula for centrism as ‘revolutionary in words, reformist in deeds’ as used by the early communist movement against such figures as Kautsky. Or as a Trotsky explained in a way that clarifies matters some more:

“Speaking formally and descriptively, centrism is composed of all those trends within the proletariat and on its periphery which are distributed between reformism and Marxism and which most often represent various stages of evolution from reformism to Marxism–and vice versa.”[30]

In Greenstein’s case the earlier formula could perhaps be rendered as ‘militantly anti-Zionist in words, pro-Zionist in deeds’, particularly as consistent opposition to political Zionism and its poisonous influence in the workers movement is become a key touchstone of revolutionary politics today.

Yet Greenstein is one of the most militant elements of the anti-Zionist Jewish left today: he oozes subjective commitment to the struggle against Zionism and racism, and for Palestinian rights. It is his political weakness, his centrist politics, which leads him to actions that completely contradict that when confronted with a consistently anti-Zionist, Marxist position. Faced with that, he sides with the ‘Jewish community’ of all classes every time, and defines it as a ‘progressive’, anti-racist obligation to, as Finkelstein puts it, “to deny (or suppress) critical socioeconomic facts”[31]

To this we counterpose the programme and outlook of the revolutionary Fourth International as expressed in the conclusion of the Transitional Programme of 1938:

To face reality squarely; not to seek the line of least resistance; to call things by their right names; to speak the truth to the masses, no matter how bitter it may be; not to fear obstacles; to be true in little things as in big ones; to base one’s program on the logic of the class struggle; to be bold when the hour for action arrives – these are the rules of the Fourth International.”[32]

Notes

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[1] See https://tonygreenstein.com/2020/03/socialist-fight-drops-its-support-for-ian-donovans-anti-semitic-theories-about-a-pan-national-jewish-zionist-bourgeoisie-or-does-it/ for the article this is a reply to.

[2] https://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1934/02/centrism-tm.htm

[3] ibid

[4] Greenstein op-cit

[5] ibid

[6] ibid

[7] ibid

[8] ibid

[9] See The Wandering Who by Gilad Atzmon, Zero Books 2011.

[10] See quote in ibid

[11] ibid

[12] ibid

[13] ibid

[14] Cited in ibid

[15] ibid

[16] http://normanfinkelstein.com/2018/08/25/finkelstein-on-corbyn-mania/. Note that there are many footnotes even in this passage, which have been removed here to make the quote readable. Following the link back to the original and then examining the footnotes is rewarding, as Finkelstein is a professional academic and footnotes meticulously.

[17] ibid

[18] ibid

[19] https://mondoweiss.net/2019/11/the-root-cause-of-the-conflict-is-the-israel-lobby/

[20] ibid

[21] ibid

[22] ibid

[23] ibid

[24] Greenstein op-cit

[25] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dutch_Cape_Colony

[26] https://www.israeli-occupation.org/2016-08-16/moshe-machover-the-decolonisation-of-palestine/

[27] Greenstein op-cit

[28] ibid

[29] https://www.socialistfight.org/uncategorized/trotskyist-faction-takes-on-the-mantle-of-socialist-fight/

[30] https://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1932/01/whatnext9.htm

[31] Finkelstein op-cit

[32] https://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1938/tp/tp-text2.htm

Trotskyist Faction Statement

Just a little over a week ago (5^th March 2020) saw a meeting in Moscow take place between Presidents Putin of Russia and Erdoğan of Turkey, which came on the back of a disastrous week for Turkey that saw 33 Turkish soldiers killed in Idlib with many more injured. Circumstances around the air strike are hazy but there are suggestions that the Russian air force was involved despite the claims from both the Turkish and Russian military that it was the result of a Syrian airstrike. Syrian forces were involved in heavy fighting against Turkish backed militia when a one-and-a-half-ton demolition bomb was dropped from the air on a building.

Claims by Turkey that it had shared the co-ordinates of its forces with the Russians were met with counterclaims by Russia. This debacle proves that events on the ground (and in the air) are not always under control and under these circumstances’ mistakes can be made, some potentially ending with disastrous unintended circumstances. This led to outrage in Turkey from both the critics of Erdoğan speaking out against his disastrous foreign policy, and from hawks angry that Turkish blood was being spilled in Syria.

Protestations to the Russians from the Turks and an insistence that Russian forces ‘step aside’ saw the NATO member pound Syrian government targets with a threat of all-out war developing. This was short lived and if anything, merely confirms what many already understand, Turkey cannot do anything in Syria against President Assad and the Syrian government forces without Russian approval and collaboration.

Both the US and the Europeans have taken up lukewarm positions with Turkey and its foray into Syrian sovereign territory, despite western Imperialist aggression being threatened against Assad and the Syrian government early in the conflict. Trump’s abandonment of the Kurds to Turkish aggression, the confusion of the US’s foreign policy being announced by Trump on the hoof with US troops being withdrawn, quickly followed by an announcement that the US was blatantly confiscating Syria’s oil fields in Deir al-Zor has put the Europeans very much in disarray.

Russian objectives have been achieved; namely to prevent Assad being removed from power, stop Syria from further destabilisation, and secure the Russian naval base at Tartus, a naval base that it has used since 1971 as a response and counterbalance to the US Sixth Fleet based in Italy.

Syria is now fully reliant on Russian support from Putin, and to a lesser extent Iran, with the only other player (and western ‘backed’ proxy) now in the country to contend with being Turkey. Turkey is caught in between a rock and a hard place, much being of its own design. From 2011 onwards it called for the removal of Assad and encouraged and allowed fighters to flood into the region providing logistical support with arms, etc. It now finds itself isolated with its militias hemmed in and surrounded in the last remaining rebel stronghold of Idlib. Turkish advances into Syria to clear what it saw as a threat from Kurdish autonomy merely drove the Kurds into the arms of Assad and have bogged the Turks down in a stalemate with another refugee crisis developing.

Defend the Refugees!

Turkey hosts nearly 4 million Syrian refugees with another 1 million threatening to cross over from Syria due to the desperate situation now unfolding. The EU acting collectively for its Imperialist components has decided that it wants nothing to do with refugees. It came to an agreement with the Turkish government in March 2016 to stem the flow of migrants from Turkey with a bribe of €6 billion to be paid by 2018.

Syrian refugees in Turkey live in a precarious situation with no or little prospects: the number of work permits granted to Syrian temporary protection beneficiaries from 1st January 2016 to 30th September 2018 was 27,930, which encourages many to enter into the exploitative labour black market, languish in poverty, or make the perilous journey by boat through the Mediterranean with profit to people smugglers. As with all conflicts it is often the working class, women, children, the elderly that suffer.

Erdoğan is now attempting to use the refugees in a cynical political attempt to gain leverage with his Western ‘allies’ either through military support, or else to gain additional funding, by opening the Turkish/Syrian border and allow refugees to pass through to Europe. Appalling treatment has been met out by Greek border guards, who shot dead one refugee caught crossing into Greece on 2^nd March 2020. Two children were also found in the water after their boat capsized off the island of Lesvos the same morning upon which one died.

Greek border guards have been firing tear gas at refugees with film footage being published online of the coastguard threatening to ram boats filled with refugees, with one film showing attempts to puncture an inflatable dinghy with a boat hook. This week there have been reports of a warehouse housing supplies for refugees being been burnt to the ground on the Greek island of Chios and a school for refugees on the island of Lesvos being torched. Many of these camps on the Greek islands are overcrowded with people living in inhumane conditions with a complete lack of medical care.

According to UNHCR, more than 4,000 people eligible for transfer were stuck on the Greek islands of Lesvos and Samos in November 2019. Syrian refugees fleeing a conflict that has raged for 9 years are not pawns or collateral damage in a game of brinkmanship. The demonisation of refugees has led to nationalists being emboldened to take things into their own hands, often with impunity with fascists even travelling to the islands from as far afield as Germany and Austria to stir up hate.

Turkey, Russia and Iran in Syria

To de-escalate the situation an agreement has been struck between the Presidents of Russia and Turkey (in line with the Sochi Agreement that was signed in 2018). Part of this new deal includes the setting up of a ‘corridor’ along the M4 motorway with joint military patrols. However, anyone witnessing the press conference in Moscow could plainly see the differences that still exist between the two sides. Turkey still sees the creation of a safe haven in Syria to return refugees as a priority; how this materialises with Turkey acting as guarantor is difficult to see and reconcile with the Russian and Syrian government positions of retaking Idlib Province. Russia views the ‘rebels’ in Idlib as terrorists and that the area be retaken back as an integral sovereign part of Syria.

A Turkish retreat will be a difficult pill to swallow for Erdoğan both domestically and regionally and it is obvious that Russia intends to allow Turkey to disengage without losing face, in what is a valuable relationship with a country that it has developed closer economic with ties recently. Turkey has become reliant on Russia, which has built the new TurkStream natural gas pipeline across the Black Sea (from Anapa to Kıyıköy) and is building a nuclear power plant in Mersin; the building of the Akkuyu power plant, at a cost of $20 billion USD, is a joint project between the Turkish government with Rosatom and puts Turkey with a heavy dependency upon Russia for its increasing energy needs.

Turkish attempts to flex its muscles and vie for geopolitical dominance in a region where US dominance is being questioned have been met with resistance and are symptomatic of capitalism in complete crisis. The power struggle involving Iran, Saudi Arabia and Egypt can be seen being played out in the conflicts in Syria, Yemen, Libya and the dispute over the Cyprus gas fields with the maritime disputes in the Mediterranean. While much of this has taken on a religious dimension, it is ultimately a battle over resources and territory.

Turkish involvement in Syria has been costly with the dog biting the hand that has often fed it with bombings in Istanbul, Ankara, Reyhanlı, Diyarbıkır and Suruç from the hands of Da’esh. Turkish soldiers coming home in body bags is not what the Turkish people will stomach and Erdoğan’s foreign policy in Syria is being severely questioned domestically; over half of the population oppose Turkish involvement and the war in Syria. The Turkish economy is not in good shape and is more of a concern to the ordinary citizen than terrorism, which has often been the rallying cry as justification for Turkish involvement.

However, what must not be forgotten in all of this is how the Syrian crisis unfolded and led to civil war in the first place. This is a tragedy for the Syrian people, and it is they who are at the heart of the suffering. After 400 years of Ottoman rule, an empire that was multicultural allowing a certain amount of religious autonomy under the ‘millet’ system, Syria then found itself ‘free’ of the Ottoman yoke after the British encouraged and assisted an Arab revolt.

However, with the aftermath of WWI and the carving up of territories by the Imperialist powers with the Sykes-Picot Agreement, Syria then soon found itself under French colonial rule. The western carving up of territories failed to consider religious and ethnic lines and has been much of the reason for tensions throughout the region ever since, often exacerbated and exploited by outside interference.

Bashar al-Assad’s ascension to the Presidency on 17^th April 2000 followed the death of his father, Hafez. The Assad dynastic rule has not been one free of authoritarianism with uprisings that have been brutally suppressed; in 1973, 1980, 1982, and then of course 2011 that led up to the civil war.

For Permanent Revolution in the Middle East!

Against the backdrop of the ‘Arab Spring’ on 28^th January 2011, a 36-year-old man, Hassan Ali Akleh, set himself alight in protest in the town of Hasakeh in north east Syria. This act of self-immolation came 6 weeks after a similar protest in Tunisia (when Mohamed Bouazizi set himself alight outside the local governor’s office) sparked protests throughout the Arab world. Both were acts of desperation against the economic hardship and conditions that these two individuals found themselves in.

This was then followed by a protest in the central neighbourhood in Damascus, Hareeqa, on 17^th February followed by a second ‘Day of Rage’ on 15^th March when thousands came out onto the streets across Syria, in towns like Hama, Hasakeh, Deraa and again in Damascus. The Syrian government’s response involved arrests, beatings and live fire with triggers that enraged people further; 15 schoolboys were arrested in Deraa on 6^th March for graffitiing anti-government slogans and tortured. Protests against the detention of the children on 18^th March resulted in the first deaths of protesters on the streets. The Omari Mosque saw thousands gather, who by now had demands on the government. These demands were again met with live fire and 15 people killed. Protesters set fire to the Baath Party HQ and the SyriaTel building.

This was the lighting of the touch paper that resulted in protests throughout Syria on 25^th March in solidarity; Homs, Hama, Raqqa, Baniyas, Aleppo, and Lattakia all saw protests. After further protests the Syrian government responded with tanks being put on the streets of Deraa on 25^th April, the city was in lockdown and government soldiers were given orders to shoot to kill on sight. The social unrest, the government’s brutal response and the unfolding political collapse and vacuum provided the conditions that were exploited by outside powers.

It didn’t take too long before arms and fighters were flooding into the country and on top of members of the Syrian Army deserting and joining the FSA led to further chaos on the ground. The instability and inability of the Syrian government to keep control allowed the rise of radical Islamist groups like Jabhat al Nusra and several smaller groups later taking control of areas, the most notorious being Da’esh. The Syrian government from early on relied on support from Hezbollah and fighters from different Iranian militias fighting under Iranian command to prevent the government completely collapsing.

Russia provided political support and military aid from an early stage in 2011, eventually with direct military involvement from 30^th September 2015 onwards. Russian involvement has brought stability to the government and has allowed it to hold on to power and recapture lost territory with only the last rebel held area of Idlib remaining.

We consider that despite the initial genuine democratic and anti-neoliberal thrust of the Arab Spring uprising in Syria, that was fairly quickly buried beneath a major US and pro-Zionist proxy war funnelled mainly through Saudi-backed jihadists. To the bulk of the Syrian people, and to ourselves, a situation evolved where Assad, the initial target of the protests, became the obvious lesser evil even to the Kurds, and the intervention of Russia and Iran, progressive interventions by non-Imperialist, semi-colonial bourgeois nations defending Syria against an imperialist regime-change attempt by proxy.

As socialists we oppose Imperialism and the foreign intervention and destabilisation of a sovereign country in a region that has already seen constant conflicts. We say no to Turkish involvement, the removal of foreign fighters from Syrian soil and no to EU racism and discrimination towards refugees fleeing from Imperialist wars.

 Until the working class of the oppressed nations throughout the region, can rise up and form governments that expropriate the means of production from private to collective ownership; a permanent revolution that mobilises all the oppressed layers of the population behind the working class in a struggle for the dictatorship of the proletariat, then nothing will change. This must go hand in hand with a world-wide revolution. Imperialism feeds off the constant cycle of decay that capitalism brings, the two are evil conjoined twins. Either socialism or barbarism……down with Imperialism and the capitalist class!

By Naciye Suman

Coronaviruses, are viruses and named for their crown like spikes that protrude from its surface  with the name COVID-19 given to this particular virus by the World Health Organisation (WHO), which derived from the first letters of the words ‘coronavirus’, ‘virus’ and ‘disease’  with the number 19 representing the year (2019). This virus (COVID-19) has symptoms (which take approximately 14 days to appear) that ranges from mild, and similar to a common cold, to being extreme with a cough, fever, fatigue, respiratory difficulties with laboured breathing, and diarrhoea, potentially leading to pneumonia and possibly causing organ failure in extreme cases.

Those with underlying health conditions and the elderly are at high risk with a mortality rate varying between 1% to 3% with unidentified cases factored in. The 6% of fatalities recorded in Italy was taken in relation to confirmed cases and with a high elderly population, despite having the second-best healthcare system ranking in the world, provided an explanation why the mortality rate is so high when comparing to elsewhere.

How did it start?

It is suspected that COVID-19 originated in the Huanan seafood market in Wuhan, the provincial capital of the Hubei region of China, a market that had both live and freshly slaughtered animals for sale. The virus was first seen to have infected people who were either working or who had shopped at the market, suggesting that the pathogen had crossed over from an animal host to humans. However, the Lancet does report that the first person and 13 others out of the initial 41 cases identified as having the virus had no connection at all to the market in Wuhan.

The virus, which was first officially reported on 31^st December 2019, and by 7^th January 2020 had been identified. It is confusing experts who are trying to determine its exact source and as the virus is considered novel (a type of virus that has never been encountered before), there is an opinion that the virus may have originated in bats which then spread to humans via a snake or pangolin. There is a study that supports this theory published in the Lancet which can be accessed here:

https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(20)30251-8/fulltext

Other pathogenic coronaviruses have crossed over from an animal host; Ebola, Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS), and Middle East Acute Respiratory Syndrome (MERS) are recent examples, both of which have very high mortality rates; 50% and 36% respectively. However, the speed at which this virus has spread and the unpreparedness of governments in how to respond has caught everyone by surprise. This resulted in the announcement by the WHO on 11^th March 2020 that it had become a global pandemic after it had spread beyond China and having seen an increase in cases of coronavirus illness, 118,000 cases in over 110 countries and territories around the world with the sustained risk of further global spread.

It seems to spread very easily from person to person, particularly in closed environments such as homes and hospitals. In less than two months it has spread on a global scale over several continents. The pathogen can travel through the air, enveloped in tiny respiratory droplets that are produced when a sick person breathes, talks, coughs or sneezes.  Testing has been available since 13^th January 2020 but availability to testing in the UK has only been reserved to those admitted into hospital. Today it has been announced that self-testing kits developed by a British company will be available to the public from next week.

Chinese intervention

China has shown the world what happens if it is slow or doesn’t react and what can also be achieved with co-ordinated state intervention. In late December the Chinese doctor, Li Wenliang, who worked in Wuhan Central City Hospital, posted a warning on social media about a cluster of cases of a flu-like disease that had been treated at his hospital. Seven patients were in quarantine with disease symptoms that reminded him of SARS (severe acute respiratory syndrome) and on 30th December 2019, he sent a message to fellow doctors in a chat group warning them about the outbreak and advising they wear protective clothing to avoid infection. He was reportedly reprimanded for spreading false information and instructed not to put out any further posts. Li Wenliang, 34, died on 7^th February 2020 after operating on a patient who unknowingly had been infected with the coronavirus.

The Chinese state, despite what seems to be the suppression of initial reports by local authorities, then took decisive action building two new hospitals in as many weeks as the outbreak unfolded. The first 60,000 sqm hospital built in Wuhan has space for 1,000 beds and 30 intensive care wards, all modular construction was built in just under 10 days, the second hospital was built 25 miles away and opened days afterwards. The government also mass mobilised medical teams to the affected areas in an attempt to contain the spread of the virus.

This is a testament to state intervention and would never have been built so quickly by relying on the private sector with its need for profit. At the time of writing (14^th March 2020) the spread of infection has slowed down considerably in China and it now shows that aggressive intervention has worked, with only 11 new cases reported today, in a country that is home to a population of 1.42 billion people. However, the total number of identified cases 80,824, has resulted in 3,189 deaths: a mortality rate of 3.95% of reported cases. The real time figures globally can be seen here:

https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/#countries

The spread of the virus

Globally 154,279 cases have been reported with 5,798 deaths, resulting in a 3.79% mortality rate. According to the WHO, the new epicentre for the disease has now been transferred to Europe, with the crisis now being concentrated in Italy which has reported 3,497 new cases, bringing a total of 21,157 nationally. Italy, the worst hit country after China, initially locked down 16 million of its citizens in the northern region of Lombardy and its 14 neighbouring provinces to try to combat the spread of the coronavirus. However, this was short-lived and had to be rolled out nationwide after people panicked with thousands attempted to move south.

Today Spain announced that it is introducing similar measures to contain the outbreak. The Spanish government is poised to declare a 15-day national lockdown from Monday 16^th March 2020 to battle the disease. This would allow people to be allowed out only for emergencies, to buy food, or for work. With 191 deaths and 6,043 infections, Spain is the worst-hit country in Europe after Italy. China, which has already sent medical assistance to Iran and Iraq and only last week confirmed that it is sending medical specialists and equipment to help the beleaguered Italians.

The official Sichuan Daily reported that a seven-member team including an expert from the Chinese Centre for Disease Control and Prevention and two respiratory disease specialists from Sichuan University’s West China Hospital will be travelling to Italy. For all the accusations against the Chinese government, the Director-General of the WHO, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, praised President Xi Jinping and other senior Chinese officials for their commitment to transparency after their meeting in Beijing.  

Johnson’s ineptitude

Meanwhile Boris Johnson’s and the British government’s response has been woeful. Johnson has completely shown himself lacking, his disappearance during the flooding in parts of the country in recent weeks has shown the absolute contempt that he harbours for the general public of this country. During his interview on ‘This Morning’ on 5^th March, he spoke about efforts to delay the spread of the virus, which he said that one of the theories is that the disease should be allowed to spread without taking “as many draconian measures” such as cancelling public events or closing schools. He previously in the interview referred to stopping public gatherings as “quite draconian” before suggesting that one theory was to allow the disease to spread through the population and “take it on the chin”.

This strategy of working towards ‘herd immunity’ conflicts with the advice being provided by the World Health Organisation and its policy against the virus, with the WHO questioning the British government’s approach. Anthony Costello, a paediatrician and former World Health Organisation Director, wrote that ‘it’s not even clear yet that catching the coronavirus will result in immunity’. Costello urged the UK to change course, asking: “Is it ethical to adopt a policy that threatens immediate casualties on the basis of an uncertain future benefit?” For this strategy to work, 60%-70% of the population would have needed to be exposed and to have built up immunity to the virus, which works in conjunction with vaccination.

At present there are no known vaccinations for COVID-19. Dozens of teams of scientists around the world are frantically attempting to develop a vaccine, with British scientists ready to test on humans after successful trials on mice. With the prediction that 80% of the UK population will potentially become infected, a conservative 1% mortality rate will result min just over 500,000 deaths. The UK government are playing with fire, late today at the time of producing this article, 322 UK scientists and 33 international signatories have written an open letter challenging the British government’s approach, which can be read here:

http://maths.qmul.ac.uk/~vnicosia/UK_scientists_statement_on_coronavirus_measures.pdf

Worryingly the government seems to be surrounded by lunatics, and not only those that are kept in the public spotlight such as Dominic Cummings. Dr David Halpern, a psychologist and Director of the Behavioural Insights Team in what are part of the government’s ‘nudge’ unit, said during an interview the on BBC News: “There’s going to be a point, assuming the epidemic flows and grows, as we think it probably will do, where you’ll want to cocoon, you’ll want to protect those at-risk groups so that they basically don’t catch the disease and by the time they come out of their cocooning, herd immunity’s been achieved in the rest of the population.”

The Behavioural Insights Team’s own web site has a blog that claims there is a strong contender for word of the year; ‘Misinfodemic’ (noun): the spread of a particular health outcome or disease facilitated by viral misinformation. This is how it claims to tackle to Coronavirus outbreak: “The emerging epidemic of the novel coronavirus, now christened ‘Covid-19’, has brought into sharp focus how the spread of misinformation can propagate confusion, potentially undermining containment efforts. As this New York Times article explains, the dramatic way that the outbreak is being reported, focusing on fatalities and city-wide lockdowns in China, means that the most severe outcomes of coronavirus are being overrepresented in our minds. The resulting anxiety is potentially harmful if it leads to an increase in racist incidents and ‘super-worriers’ filling hospital waiting rooms.” 

Dr David Halpern has been closely associated with the Tory government, having been chief analyst in David Cameron’s Strategy Unit (2001–2007). According to his organisation’s web site, he…. “led numerous reviews, including the UK government’s strategic audits and recent policy reviews; set up the Social Exclusion Task Force and drafted its action plan; and authored many of the Strategy Unit’s most influential papers, such as those on life satisfaction, personal responsibility and behaviour change.” His work has already been questioned in 2013, when the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) came under investigation by a health watchdog for administering “sham” psychometric tests to the unemployed and threatening to withdraw their benefits if they did not complete them.

We have a Prime Minster, who just like Trump in America, are both clearly out of their depth and have become bystanders while events unfold around them. It seems that psychology and the manipulation of the population and not medical health and the intervention of the state became priority, until the science caught up with them. It has been left to companies and organisations themselves, such as the premier league, to cancel football matches, other large gatherings like the London Marathon, and for businesses to implement their own social distances policies and instruct their workforce to work from home.

The British media today report that the Johnson’s government will bring in sweeping emergency powers to be given to the Police, which would allow them to detain people with the virus, reduce elderly care and force schools and nurseries to stay open if they are ‘deemed to have closed unnecessarily’. The Daily Mirror newspaper claims to have seen the proposed legislation, which will remain in effect for two years. The government are blatantly only interested in protecting capital with discussions on insulating the damage to the economy and not protecting UK citizens. 

Responding to COVID-19

At the time of writing this article, the death rate in the UK from the virus almost doubled in one day to 21 deaths. Implementations need to be put into place quickly to prevent large gatherings and as such schools need to be closed. While children are at an age group that are likely to show the most resilience to the virus, schools are also likely to be ideal hubs for transmission. The argument provided by the government is that many healthcare workers and workers of other essential services would be prevented from working, having to remain at home to look after their children.

This is where the state needs to intervene and prioritise, schools could remain open as a crèche for the children of essential service workers only, which would reduce the risks associated with large gatherings. Instead the government are more interested in the economy, which is already under stress, and seemingly not concerned with the health and well being of its citizens.  Boris Johnson announced on national TV that many people will “lose loved ones”, which came on the back of a government warning that the Police will not be able to deal with low level crime and that hospitals will not have enough beds; situations that already exist prior to this outbreak.

The government are softening people up for the inevitable hurricane that is about to arrive. The British bourgeois state neither has the capability, resources, or the inclination to deal with the emergency which can be perfectly summarised in its response when posed with a question of how it would cope with the shortage of 100,000 NHS staff…. simple was the response, it would consider bringing out people that had retired from the NHS, until the government had to be reminded that it was these very people from the age group that are at highest risk. Ten years of savage cuts by the Tories with its ideologically driven austerity programme has left this country and its population in bad shape to combat this virus.

The NHS has 17,000 fewer beds than at 2010. With an overcrowded and understaffed prison system, and healthcare homes with their elderly residents, these environments are at high risk from the viral infection. Many of these homes are being kept afloat with stressed out and poorly paid staff, most of which would find it economically difficult to take time from work to self-isolate. These care workers, NHS and other public sector staff will find themselves on the front line battling this disease. According to Shelter, over 320,00 people are declared as homeless in the UK, with someone dying on the streets every 19 hours. An estimated 14.2 million UK citizens are living in poverty, in what is considered to be the fifth richest country in the world, these people are at severe risk from this disease.

What this outbreak has shown is that how interconnected globally we all are, whether economically, politically or socially. The protectionist policies and the closure of borders have been compromised; disease cannot be shut out. However, this will not prevent the reactionary ruling class from attempting to mitigate the financial collapse and defend themselves. We already see travel bans, and we already see the attempts in blaming the economic situation, which has still not recovered from the financial crash of 2008, on the spread of the virus. This is a public health crisis that has been used as a smokescreen to cover over the economic crisis.

The capitalist system is built on foundations made of nothing more than sand, sand which is shifting rapidly. The stock market has already dived with £trillions wiped off the values of stocks and shares, and we now see Russia and Saudi Arabia disagreeing over oil production and pricing, which has resulted in 30% drop in oil prices. Governments are now scrambling around to ensure economic survival by propping up the system, to protect the capitalist system from an event that was not the cause of the financial instability, but one that has rather exposed its weakness.

As often is the case, the working classes, the poor, the homeless, the sick and the elderly will be the ones to bear the brunt of this epidemic. Hospital care will be limited, healthcare professionals will have difficult choices to make, which beds and ventilators are available, and which patients will be prioritised or denied medical care to be treated like a dispensable commodity.  The rich will be insulated to an extent, today the Queen announced that she would flee London and retreat to her home in Windsor Castle. The majority do not have the luxury to retreat to a country home, or even to self-isolate. Panic buying has resulted in those with poorer incomes being left behind, many people live hand to mouth and cannot afford to purchase in bulk in advance, and with empty shelves in supermarkets will find themselves at a stressful disadvantage.

This situation has the potential to cause severe economic hardship and cause social unrest. While many on the left could not see street protests developing due to atomisation of the working class, low trade union membership, low number of strikes and organised workers struggles taking place in the workplace; this could crystalize into working class action. During this crisis we must ensure that the workers are protected from losing their homes, whether through suspension of mortgage and private rent payments; unlimited sick pay for any workers who may find themselves having contracted the virus; empty buildings commandeered and made into field hospitals; ensure that the elderly and those that are homeless, or those that are living in poverty are protected; industries finding themselves facing bankruptcy need to be nationalised and small businesses protected from going under.

The state needs to come up with a contingency plan for the wellbeing of all and not one that will protect just the capitalist class. Realistically these things could only take place under a socialist government and having a workers’ state with a worker controlled planned economy producing for need and not for profit. To achieve this, we need a truly revolutionary workers’ party, a party that acts as a tribune of the masses. The coming months may well define the future of this country.  

In this period of extreme weakness of the revolutionary Marxist left, political programmes and traditions have become represented by individuals and small groups to a greater extent than was true in periods where the left was stronger. This is obvious when you look at the state of left-wing politics today. This is a temporary phase of course, reminiscent in some ways of the days of Marx and Engels, but it is where we are at today.

Look at the large sects: the Socialist Workers Party (SWP) and its splinters such as Counterfire; or the Socialist Party (SP) and its splinters such as Socialist Alternative and Socialist Appeal. These are largely ineffectual but still have a sizeable number of members. As organisations, they have nothing much to offer because they are variants of left reformism or at best right-centrism, and not really that different to the Labour Left. Yet their purely organisational sectarianism, and their size, meant that they were outside the Corbyn movement and unable to act as a polarising force within it. On some questions, their political impulses and records were in fact worse than the instincts of the best rank-and-file Corbyn supporters.

For instance the Socialist Party/Militant has had over the decades a dreadful record over imperialism. From its tacit approval of British rule in Ireland during the decades of war between the British state and Irish republicans, its softness to the point of indulgence on the sectarianism of the Ulster Loyalist working class, to its more or less open support of British ‘democracy’ in the 1982 Malvinas War and its insistence on the supposed ‘rights’ of the British colonial ‘Falkland’ population, it hardly has a record superior to that of the Labour left. This is of a piece with its softness on Zionism, its insistence on ‘two states’ and the supposed ‘right to self-determination’ of the Israeli Jewish population on the land that was taken by force from the Palestinian Arabs in the first place. This of course has been a major issue in Labour, and this tradition has been found wanting.

The various splinter groups of Militant/Socialist Party do not so far appear fundamentally different. Socialist Alternative broke with the SP and its leader Peter Taaffe out of disgust with his clique’s bureaucratism, which is almost a caricature of a bureaucratised organisation, but there does not so far appear to be anything in the way of a profound political differentiation with Taaffe involved, being mainly about the details of tactics in the trade unions and different, but hardly revolutionary, attitudes to elements in the bureaucracy in some unions. Socialist Appeal, based on the core of the original Militant group around the late Ted Grant and Alan Woods, is deeply Labourite in its practice though it does have some interesting theoretical positions on aspects of Stalinism and a slightly higher political level derived from Grant’s earlier history as one of the pioneering Trotskyists in Britain.

Then there is the hidebound remaining SWP, after the ruinous splits of the past decade, whose products have proved ephemeral but which left the SWP a bankrupt, rightist rump: For instance over its refusal to defend Julian Assange through the whole period of the years-long smear campaign against him over the Swedish ‘honey trap’, which laid the basis for the current extradition show trial. The SWP’s tradition, from their founder Tony Cliff onwards, was the refusal to defend the Soviet bloc deformed/degenerated workers states against imperialist attack, branding it instead ‘State Capitalism’ and just as much ‘imperialist’ as the West, under the slogan “Neither Washington nor Moscow but International Socialism”.

Now under Alex Callinicos the SWP have overcome their more left-wing period under the leadership of John Rees and Lindsey German during the Iraq War period, where they blocked with George Galloway in RESPECT, loudly proclaimed their anti-Zionism, hosted Gilad Atzmon at Marxism, and their members occasionally engaged in fisticuffs with the pro-Zionist, pro-imperialist Alliance for Workers Liberty. Now instead under Callinicos the SWP insist on the presence of “Friends of Israel” in their ‘Stand up to Racism” front group events and strong-arm Palestinian supporters who protest. This is a major move to the right by the SWP.

Then there are some smaller groups: such as Counterfire, led by the aforementioned Rees and German, basically a more left wing version of the SWP. At least they are not pro-Zionist.  But they are movement-ists – their main activity is building the Stop the War Coalition (STWC), the People’s Assembly Against Austerity, or at one point Unite the Resistance, as single issue fronts, with reformist and/or pacifist politics. STWC led huge the Iraq anti-war demos but the SWP under Rees and German did not advocate a revolutionary programme within it – they were content with the politics of their left-reformist bloc-partners. To their credit they built RESPECT, making an electoral bloc with George Galloway when he was expelled from Labour for advocating Arab resistance to the imperialist war, but again they did not advocate a revolutionary programme within it and try to win support for it. There is a crying need to recruit people to a revolutionary programme in all these situations, not just amorphous ‘left organisation’ which tends in practice to be left reformist by default.

Which brings us to the attitude of the left to a key strategic question of the revolution in Britain: the Labour Party:  This saw a genuine leftward development with the Corbyn movement in 2015; it was able to seize on the forced error of the soft-left leadership of Ed Miliband, which tried to revive a decaying Labour Party after the defeat and discredit Blairism brought upon it. This left development came from the base of the Labour Party, including many Labour supporters ‘exiled’ by Blairism. It saw a mass influx of left-wing people that pushed Labour to the left.

Leftward Movement and Coming Together

In this context, of large but left-reformist sects and their inability to deal with the Labour Party question, individual revolutionary militants who seek to go further play a critical role. This was the context of the re-emergence of Socialist Fight in the mid 20-teens. Two Trotskyists militants played a major role in this group which did attract attention and play something of a polarising role: Ian Donovan and Gerry Downing, henceforth referred to by their initials.

ID was a product of Spartacism, who, episodically disillusioned with orthodox Trotskyism in the late 1990s due to the Spartacists’ pathology and abuses, became a left-wing third-campist for a while, but was then re-radicalised by the Iraq war and pushed back far to the left.  He was radicalised by the experience of being in RESPECT, an organisation subjected to a degree of racist political persecution, including by Zionists. Their persecution of Galloway and RESPECT was an anticipation of the later witchhunt against Corbynism. Notwithstanding this mistaken third-camp position, ID came to the most radical anti-Zionist/anti-imperialist position of all, in the tradition of Abram Leon, embodied in  his 2014 Draft Theses on the Jews and Modern Imperialism.

GD, was an oppositionist in the Healyite Workers Revolutionary Party at the time of its 1985 explosion and collapse, one of many active participants. He then went through various organisations: the Revolutionary Internationalist League, International Socialist Group, the Workers International League, Workers Fight with 2 other ex-WRP cadre with varied politics, then the Committee for a Marxist Party in alliance with the CPGB/Weekly Worker. He then founded Socialist Fight in 2009 with two other ex-ISG cadre, whom he then split from over the issue of their defence of the film director Roman Polanksi, who admitted to statutory rape of a 13 year old girl and appears from the evidence to be guilty of actual rape. After breaking with his initial collaborators he then fused his rump group with some Brazilian and Argentinian Trotskyists groups in 2013 as part of an anti-imperialist response to imperialist intervention in Syria and Libya, to form the Liaison Committee for the Fourth International (LCFI). This gave an international dimension to his politics that meant it was no longer his operation.

Then GD got together politically with ID in 2015: ID won Gerry to his position on Zionism and GD conversely played an important role in ID re-embracing a better orthodoxy over the USSR and deformed workers states, rejecting the very-leftist third-campism of Walter Daum’s League for the Revolutionary Party whose views on ‘statified capitalism’ ID had previously adhered to.

A Genuine Marxist Analysis of Zionism: the Tradition of Abram Leon

GD and ID thus both moved left in slightly different ways under the impact of the Corbyn movement. GD embraced ID’s most radical position on Zionism, which treats Israel as an imperialist power in its own right, not just a puppet of the US, and notes that its power in the world is built not just on its territorial size and productive capacity but on a powerful Jewish-Zionist faction in the ruling classes in the Western imperialist countries, who mobilise on the basis of a common ethnocentric project with the Israeli ruling class itself. In fact Israel’s racist ‘law of return’ quite consciously internationalises Israeli citizenship to all those born Jewish around the world. This has the effect of, even more importantly, internationalising a bourgeois layer particularly in the United States, to a lesser extent in Western Europe, where Jewish representation in the wealthiest layers of the bourgeoisie, is often a couple of dozen or more times greater than the percentage of Jews in the wider population.

In reality, this creates a situation where Israel’s capitalist ruling class does not just live in Israel, but overlaps with the ruling classes of these traditional imperialist countries, and the dominant bourgeois politics among bourgeois Jews being political Zionism, produces powerful ethnically-based factions within the ruling classes of the older imperialist countries that are in fact part of the Israeli ruling class also. Zionism’s internationalisation of Israeli citizenship is consciously designed to create and nurture this situation, and a complete understanding of this issue is essential for the understanding of supporters of the Palestinians everywhere.

This phenomenon has deep historical roots; it is a product of Jewish history and socio-economic development. Karl Marx, in The Jewish Question (1843) wrote of this: “Let us not look for the secret of the Jew in his religion, but let us look for the secret of his religion in the real Jew”. And he went on to explain that “The chimerical nationality of the Jew is the nationality of the merchant, of the man of money in general”. This was systematised by Abram Leon, who was subsequently martyred in Auschwitz, in his seminal Marxist work The Jewish Question: A Marxist Interpretation (1943).

Following on from Marx’s original insight Leon elaborated the history of the Jews as a commodity- and money-trading people-class in medieval times, which is the reason why Jews as a distinct human group survived from antiquity whereas other ancient populations, such as Phoenicians, Romans, Assyrians, Babylonians, and many more, disappeared through assimilation into newer composite populations. The Jews survived as a distinct population because they occupied that niche in feudal society and, though the people-class that Leon described disappeared with the end of feudalism, it did not do so without trace. Jews as a people continued, not as a people-class anymore, but as a multi-class population with however a very different proportionality of the characteristic classes of capitalist society to that of the general populations within the societies they inhabited.

Their evolution can only be understood as a dialectical process; their unique history led them both to persecution, oppression and genocide; to Jewish intellectuals and artisan-proletarians playing a very prominent, vanguard role in the workers movement particularly in its early period up to the mid-20th Century, when the tragedy of the Nazi genocide led to the decisive defeat and destruction of that invaluable Jewish left, and to a dialectical inversion whereby the outsized Jewish bourgeoisie gained dominance over Jews, and in the second half of the 20th century that Jewish bourgeoisie, with Zionist politics, increasingly played a vanguard role for the bourgeoisie, in the offensive against the workers movement known as neo-liberalism from the 1970s onwards.

Indeed the entire strategy of Zionism as a movement was to take advantage of bourgeois anti-Semitism as a kind of perverse ally in order to raise Jews up as a people from being oppressed pariahs to one of the world’s oppressor peoples, even at the cost of collaborating with the destruction of the most progressive elements of the Jewish population itself. Again in a dialectical sense, this can be seen as a quite novel, if fearsome and colossally destructive, manifestation of class struggle within the Jewish population as a class-differentiated remnant of the people-class that they once were.

This has become particularly clear since the collapse of Stalinism and the counterrevolution in the Soviet bloc at the turn of the 1980s/1990s decade, with the eruption of post-Cold War conflicts centrally in the Middle East, such as over Iraq and then the manipulation of elements of the 2011 ‘Arab Spring’ revolts in the Arab world. All this to try to strengthen Israel through the destruction of its most radical, pro-Palestinian opponents among the Arab regimes, starting with Iraq, moving onto the destruction of Qadaafi and then the crusade against Syria’s Assad, which is still ongoing, and has been thwarted in large measure through resistance to US and Zionist imperialism’s proxy war by Putin’s Russia and Iran.  The threat of war against Iran, as well as the crucifixion of the Palestinians by Trump and Netanyahu’s openly genocidal ‘deal of the century’ is another manifestation of the bloc between Zionist imperialism and its Great Power protectors that has introduced a crucial modification, and a contradiction and weakness, into the ‘normal’ workings of imperialist capitalism.

Thus the Jewish question, because of the unique social relationship of Jews to commodity exchange under two social systems, has been strategically intertwined with the evolution of the capitalist system right from its very beginning, not for any teleological or still less biological reason, but simply because of their relationship with the historically evolved channels through which capital has flowed during its complex, dialectical process of coming into the world, and also the process by which it is beginning to prepare its own demise.  Because of this happenstance, Jews have been at the centre of such world-historic events as the colonisation of Palestine, the Second World War and the genocide, and the Ziocon wars of the early 21st century. Thus Marx’s essay The Jewish Question has proved seminal to fully understanding the world in which we live, and this subject is of strategic importance for Marxists.

Again dialectically it can be argued that what is seen as an asset for their system by the wider bourgeoisie, to the point that there are no more ardent fighters against non-existent ‘left-wing anti-Semitism’ than the bourgeois class itself, is also a contradiction and potentially an explosive problem for them. Thus we see the extreme bourgeois hostility that confronts anyone on the left who attempts to analyse the Jewish question and the strategic aspects of it for the proletariat.

This provides the objective background, in terms of at least partially understanding this question, for the coming together and limited rise of Socialist Fight in parallel with the left-moving Corbyn current in the British Labour Party in the mid 20-teens, and the collapse of GD into Zionist apologetics as that movement went into meltdown in 2019 and early 2020.

The Beginning of Downing’s Political Collapse

The manifestations of GD’s collapse into pro-Zionism are very clear in his continuing drip-drip of Zionist propaganda into Socialist Fight in early 2020 for use as political weapons against the programme he had stood for over approximately the previous five years.

This appears to have begun after a 10-day family trip to Ireland that GD undertook in August 2019. We have no idea what actually went on there, but it does appear that some sort of political alliance was created between GD and his daughter ED to try to change the politics of Socialist Fight and make it ‘respectable’ on the left-Zionist-influenced, capitulatory ‘far left’. Since GD had been very prominent over the previous four years and more in arguing for SF’s hard anti-Zionist views and hostility to the Jewish ethnic bigotry and racism that is the content of political Zionism and its capitulators, he faces a serious problem in trying to live this down.

So his tactic for doing so seems to have been to attack others, and he engaged in some pretty ludicrous baiting of others on the left, including the Jewish left, as being amenable to fascism and anti-Semitism. His first target in this regard was Tony Greenstein at Communist University 2019.

Knowing he would not get the endorsement of Socialist Fight comrades for this, he put out his own personal leaflet attacking Greenstein for his expressed admiration for the sometimes left-Zionist, sometimes somewhat anti-Zionist, Jewish philosopher Hannah Arendt, and particularly for her account of the 1961 Eichmann trial, Eichmann in Jerusalem. GD attacked Greenstein as soft on Nazism for refusing to condemn Arendt for her long-time relationship with the existentialist philosopher and dilettante Martin Heidegger, who joined the Nazi party when Hitler came to power,  but dropped out of political activity when he became uneasily aware that Hitler suspected him of sympathy with the SA leader Ernst Röhm, whose followers were eliminated in the 1934 ‘Night of the Long Knives’.

It is clear that Heidegger was not a serious political figure in the Nazi regime; the claims that GD made that he was some sort of ideological inspiration for the Nazis are ludicrous. He was a marginal figure and Arendt’s relationship with him is simply a personal matter of no political significance. This is just an example of GD echoing a characteristic Zionist attack on Arendt for her criticism in Eichmann in Jerusalem of Israel’s laws against mixed marriage, which she condemned as similar to the Nazis’ Nuremburg laws. Whose entire ethos her on-off relationship with Heidegger incidentally made a mockery of, though at the crucial period he betrayed her and she left Germany until after Hitler’s defeat.

This irrelevant, guilt-by-association attack on Tony Greenstein was simply GD’s grossly unprincipled, subjective manner of paying him back for Greenstein’s wrong-headed condemnation and exclusion of GD, ID and Socialist Fight from Labour Against the Witchhunt in January 2018, not to mention his failure to defend GD against the witchhunt and his auto-exclusion from the Labour Party in March 2016, when Greenstein condemned him as a fool undeserving of defence for his defence of Islamic State against imperialist attack and his support for SF’s position on Zionism and the Jewish Question.

Defence of Gilad Atzmon: a Litmus Test of anti-Zionism

This was a bad sign, but much worse was to come. One thing SF had become known for, as well as our material on the Jewish Question detailed above, was our refusal to support exclusion and witchhunting against the Israeli-Jewish Jazz musician Gilad Atzmon. We defend him not only against Zionists, but figures on the Jewish left who denounce him as anti-Semitic for his renunciation of Jewish identity, his denunciation of the overseas Zionist lobby as driven by Jewish exclusivism and a desire for domination, his public expression of doubts about some aspects of the Nazi holocaust of Jews, and his belief that Jewish chauvinism was behind some of the crimes of Stalinism, particularly in the Ukraine in the 1930s. He also, as is well known, promotes his idealist philosophical criticism of Jewish identity widely and engages with people on the far right as well as the far left of politics.

We in Socialist Fight prior to GD’s renegacy always regarded Gilad Atzmon as an organic product of the contradictions of Israeli politics, and refused to join in the witchhunts against him, despite disagreements with much of his political confusion. We do not consider his theory of Jewish identity to be anti-Semitic; this divides Jewish people into three overlapping categories, the first two of which, those simply born Jewish and those who merely adhere to the Jewish religion, are considered by Atzmon to be harmless and innocent categories. Atzmon only regards as problematic his third category, which consists of those who consider their Jewishness to be a political trait that is more important than any other trait, those who consider themselves ‘chosen’ and superior to others in other words. We do not consider his position to be an attack on all Jewish people and therefore we do not condemn his position as racist and anti-Semitic.

GD knew full well what Atzmon’s views were on the Russian Revolution right from July 2015, when he reblogged one of Atzmon’s videos, titled ‘The Jewish Solidarity Spin’[1] , on the Socialist Fight website with an introduction by ID that criticised those same views. Though he was aware of Tony Greenstein’s antipathy to, and criticisms of, Atzmon in detail having supported Greenstein’s anti-Atzmon campaign in 2009, GD changed his mind around 2015 and defended Atzmon for years with considerable pride. He even authored an article in December 2017, which attacked Tony Greenstein for having grovelingly noted that the Board of Deputies had earlier praised him for opposing Atzmon when Greenstein himself was suspended from Labour in March 2016.  GD’s article denounced Tony Greenstein thus:

“So when he is under attack his immediate response was to plead to the “Zionist Board of Deputies of British Jews (BOD) and other Zionists” to defend him because he has given them Gilad Atzmon’s head on a plate and they should reciprocate the favour…”[2]

Then there is Atzmon’s interview with GD during the dispute that led to the exclusion of Socialist Fight from Labour Against the Witchhunt (LAW) in January 2018. In that interview Atzmon asked him the following question:

“In the recent LAW meeting Greenstein and Walker reportedly said that ‘making a connection between the number of Jewish billionaires in the US or who is Jewish amongst the richest sections of society and imperialist support for Israel is anti-Semitic.’ I guess that Walker and Greenstein believe that Jewish politics and mammon are beyond criticism. Can you tell us which political school may adhere to such a peculiar approach? Is there any Left ideology or working-class politics that excludes criticism of Jewish mammon and influence?”

To which GD replied:

“Of course, that ideology is Zionism.”

GD partially dissociated himself from some of Atzmon’s views thus:

“I do not agree with Gilad on the question of Jewish identity. it is entirely wrong to equate Jewishness or Jewish cultural identity with Zionism. Zionism is a modern, right wing, racist political construct, that takes some aspects of Jewish history and oppression and uses this to distort and falsify the whole historical materialist basis of that history, as explained so well by Abram Leon in On the Jewish Question.

“I do not agree with ostracising him and his co-thinkers from the struggle against Zionism, despite these disagreements. I do not agree he is either racist or anti-Semitic”.[3]

Yet despite these disclaimers, GD unilaterally took the decision to include Atzmon’s interview with him, in the following print edition of Socialist Fight, because it filled an empty space and also likely because it raised GD’s personal profile. But this was a tactical error, as the interview was not even our copy, and its prominence in the printed journal was a godsend to Zionists, who were able to put pressure on two left bookshops in London, Housemans and the SWP’s Bookmarks, to ban Socialist Fight from sale at these outlets.

GD’s dissociations are fair enough, as Marxists are not hostile per se to the expression of Jewish identity provided it does not trump the basic tenets of the class struggle, that class, not any kind of other identity, is the primary driving force of social struggle and human emancipation. But nevertheless GD was quite well aware, when questioned by Atzmon, that the hostility of the likes of Greenstein, Jackie Walker and others to SF’s Marxist analysis of the diaspora Jewish bourgeois component of Zionism is derived from left-Zionist influence on their politics. He clearly defended SF’s Draft Theses on the Jews and Modern Imperialism in this interview, as he did on Andrew Neil’s Daily Politics show in March 2016, and to Atzmon he denounced the ‘leftist’ opposition to it as in essence Zionist. By his own then-criteria, therefore, his current politics are now left-Zionist.

Yet in September 2019, when Atzmon’s associate Devon Nola posted an item on Facebook comparing a law banning BDS (boycotts of Israel) in the US with the ‘Bolshevik’ decree (in fact instituted by Stalin in 1932) that instituted the ‘death penalty’ for ‘anti-Semitism’, GD denounced this as ‘Nazi propaganda’ and characterised Atzmon and his supporters as ‘Strasserites’, i.e. left-wing fascists, an absurd comparison given the Jewish-Israeli origin of the Atzmonites and their clear solidarity with the Arab victims of Zionism. It should be noted that the Strasserites were German fascists who were just as hostile to the then-oppressed Jewish population of Germany and Europe as Hitler’s own diehard supporters. They just took as good coin the Nazis’ sometimes use of anti-capitalist rhetoric and tried to implement is, which is why Hitler had them suppressed and slaughtered.

The idea that Jewish or Jewish-led equivalents of ‘Strasserites’ could embrace Israel’s victims is utterly ridiculous, and a sign that GD had begun to capitulate ideologically to Zionism, and to regard the Palestinian Arab population and its ferocious, genocidal oppression at the hands of Jewish-Zionist racists, as of little import or significance. What really mattered to GD even at his point, implicitly, was the attitude of every current, even Jewish ones, to Jews. Behind this is the Zionist conception that in every possible situation, even when Jews are the perpetrators of racist crimes, eternal Jewish victimhood is the overriding political issue that eclipses all others.

A fairly extensive literary discussion then took place on the Socialist Fight website in which some disputed questions about the Atzmonites, but not the fundamental question of the pan-imperialist component of Zionism, were explored at some length. But the discussion was inconclusive, and comradely political relations had not broken down at that point.[4]

General Election and After: Downing’s Political Meltdown

This discussion was a bad sign, of GD bowing to the reactionary pro-Zionist climate that was developing as the Corbyn movement began to decline.  But the final straw was the loss of the General Election by Labour on 13th December 2019, when Boris Johnson’s Tories, by ‘fair’ means or foul (and there may have been an element of foul) defeated Labour coming out of it with an overall majority of 80.

The differences exploded again with full force in a discussion about the likelihood of widespread electoral fraud in the General Election. GD denigrated the very idea as insane, despite considerable unease among Labour members that their experiences of favourable receptions when canvassing for Labour, including in quite a few of the Northern seats that went over to the Tories, did not match up with the exit polls and the subsequent results. Neither ourselves nor the many Labour supporters with similar suspicions, who seem to number in the tens of thousands, have any way at this point of verifying these suspicions.

But such things as a doubling of the postal vote to 38% in some places, reported by Lord Ashcroft’s highly respected polling company after the election, and the fact that two prominent Tory or sympathetic personalities, the BBC’s Political Editor Laura Kuenssberg, and the Foreign Secretary Dominic Raab, appeared to have broken electoral law by talking about, and for that matter knowing about, the contents of the postal vote before it was even legal to count it, is grounds for suspicion that there was something fishy about the election results.

Then there is Theresa May’s remark, seemingly on behalf of the ruling class, to Corbyn at PM’s Question Time in December 2017: “we will never allow you to govern”[5]. And there are the remarks of US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, secretly recorded in June 2018 when meeting with ‘Jewish leaders’ talking about Jeremy Corbyn becoming British Prime Minister:

“’It could be that Mr Corbyn manages to run the gauntlet and get elected,’ he said on the recording. ‘It’s possible. You should know, we won’t wait for him to do those things to begin to push back. We will do our level best. It’s too risky and too important and too hard once it’s already happened.’”[6]

In the view of GD, such speculation was lunacy, and ‘conspiracy theory’. For him, the working class has chosen anti-immigrant racism and voted for the Tories over Brexit, and that was the end of it. The Labour defeat for him was due to the failure of Corbyn to stand up to the anti-Semitism smears (which was true, and this did weaken Labour) and also the failure of Labour to take a firm enough stand against Brexit. Though quite how a firmer Labour stand against Brexit was likely to win over a racist working class that was voting for the Tories in order to force Brexit through is not clear.

Some would argue that it is quite feasible that postal vote fraud could have been used to exaggerate known trends among some demoralised sections of the working class to vote Tory for Brexit and turn a known danger of a retrograde political trend into a Tory landslide. The idea that the British electoral system is untainted by fraud and that it is lunatic conspiracy mongering to even suspect something like this is an example of blind faith in the British ruling class to uphold ‘democracy’. Such an attitude is unworthy of a Marxist.

But what really made GD show his hand was when comrade ID shared on Facebook a piece from Veterans Today, a US anti-war, pro-Iran/Russia conspiratorial anti-Zionist website, which pulled together anecdotal evidence from Labour supporters around the UK pointing to there being something suspicious about the election results. The article also contained, right at the beginning, a statement that Boris Johnson was a ‘Rothschild Stooge’. Then the gloves were off: for GD the post was ‘anti-Semitic’ and sharing it was an unforgivable crime, even though the evidence on apparent fraud that it contained was quite authentic.

And thus the dispute was revived again. Veterans Today had connections to Atzmon; he sometimes wrote for it, it has people who write for it who think that Israel was responsible for 9/11, who think that the Nazi holocaust was a hoax. However, GD had a problem even with this, as he had stood on a public platform at a joint Socialist Fight public meeting in July 2017, a rather large meeting attended by around 150 people, with Vanessa Beeley, a defender of the Syrian regime and an uncritical Assad supporter, speaking in defence of Syria against the US/UK/Israel backed jihadist destabilisation and proxy war. She has written regularly for Veterans Today for several years. So in denouncing ID for sharing material from Veterans Today calling into question the legitimacy of the result of the UK General Election, GD was also implicitly attacking some of his best known work. If it was impermissible to share articles from Veterans Today, then surely it was impermissible to share a platform with Vanessa Beeley?

Corruption and Fraud

Undeterred by such logic, he went on and drafted a ‘Socialist Fight statement’ attacking Veterans Today, Gilad Atzmon, and others around him as Strasserite fascists. He campaigned long and hard to try to get a majority in the organisation he founded to get this statement endorsed by a majority of the full, voting membership. But he failed. In two votes, one of London members in what was supposed to be a closed meeting, the vote was tied, as it was in a national vote of SF members with the deadline a week later. A tied motion falls. So GD was reduced to putting his statement out in the names of individuals who agreed to sign it, including a couple of overseas supporters and a number non-members, including his own daughter, who he tried to recruit at the last minute to the organisation notwithstanding the constitutional requirement for a 6-month non-voting candidacy subject to the approval of a vote of the existing membership.

So after that he tried fraud to get the majority he wanted. He insisted that an ex-member, who had neither paid regular subscriptions nor attended meetings for over a year, was still a full member and entitled to a vote. ID had disagreed and insisted he was obviously lapsed. He attempted also to pay for the votes of two candidate members six months in advance by paying their membership subscriptions up to July 2020 in the expectation that they would vote for his position when they gained full membership in July. Not realising that normal Bolshevik practice is for the existing full membership in good standing to decide on questions of membership standards. And he tried to recruit his daughter into the organisation as a ‘candidate’, who in the last five years had shown no particular desire to join the organisation, again without the existing full members getting a vote on this, as is elementary. These being desperate acts of petty corruption designed to try to win a vote that he could not win with the properly politically recruited, active membership of the organisation.

Ten days after the voting deadline for the second vote had expired, and thus after the vote had been tied, GD claimed to have contacted the lapsed ‘member’ and secured his vote, giving him a ‘majority’, and so he reposted his original statement on the SF website fraudulently as a ‘Socialist Fight statement’, abusing his personal position as custodian of the collectively paid-for website to do so.

A Principled Trotskyist Faction Faces Racism and Abuse

In the meantime those opposed to him had founded the Trotskyist Faction, which produced a principled platform that stood on key programmatic documents that made up the core politics of SF, including GD’s material on the Russian Question and deformed workers states, ID’s material criticising the sectarian deviations of the Spartacist tradition in dealing with mass working class-based reformist parties that are involved in Popular Fronts; and ID’s material on Zionism and the Jewish Question, as well as a whole set of other points making up a concrete Trotskyist platform.

The Trotskyist Faction has a non-white majority and also comprises the majority of non-white comrades in SF. GD’s undeclared faction is all-white.  But this has not stopped an orgy of ‘racist’ baiting and at times thinly-veiled racist abuse from GD and his faction accusing our non-white, majority Asian/Middle Eastern faction of being sympathetic to fascism and white supremacism. That peculiarity also should alert experienced people as to the pro-Zionist nature of GD’s faction, as race-baiting, including of non-white leftists is a characteristic Zionist behaviour based on belittling the oppression of non-Jewish oppressed groups.

Gareth Martin, a white South African sympathiser of GD’s faction that he tried to inveigle into the organisation without a vote, accused an SF comrade of Turkish/Muslim background who lives in London of supporting the murder of Jews in synagogues in London. But there have been no such events in London. The smear was extremely sinister and Islamophobic, and appears to reflect a pro-Zionist colonial outlook, as befits someone from a white-dominated racist state that collaborated with Israel over nuclear weapons on the basis of a shared antipathy to non-whites.

Equally disturbing was the smear from one Rob Lyons, a North American sympathiser of GD on this issue at least, who in the course of a Facebook discussion with our Turkish comrade, referred to Turkish men beating their wives and became personally abusive when it was pointed out that the person he was arguing with was Turkish. Islamophobic stereotypes and slurs have been a key activity of GD’s pro-Zionist supporters in this factional dispute.

And if one is speaking of bigotry, there is GD’s reproduction of a leaflet by the Spartacist League from 1999 that branded ID a ‘dangerous lunatic’ and suggested that ID was likely to physically attack people. This on the basis of ID having once suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder as a result of abusive behaviour experienced at the hands of leading figures in the Spartacist League over 30 years ago, which provoked a physical altercation 21 years ago. The leaflet GD dragged out was condemned by a workers enquiry 21 years ago as an ‘unforgiveable crime’ by the Spartacists, of persecuting their former members in order to provoke violence and further victimise them. GD’s dragging out of this leaflet in this context amounts to attacking ID for once having suffered a disability. Which is an atrocious thing for a supposed socialist to do.

This was matched by the most pathetic bureaucratic chicanery. As is our constitutional right in SF, the Trotskyist Faction published two statements on the political situation in SF. One gave a detailed analysis and condemnation of GD’s corrupt practices against us and his organisational abuses. The other was a detailed political reply to the previous political attacks on us. When we published this material on the website, as is our right, GD used his ownership of the website to remove our statements. He then deleted ID’s user login from the website, and proceeded to remove our comrades’ posting rights on a range of SF forums on Facebook, before he overreached himself and removed us from an international list that he does not have control of. The international comrades objected and reinstated us. So instead, using the stolen SF website, he announced our ‘expulsion’ from SF, and then finally even blocked our comrades on Facebook, the final admission that he could not handle what we had to say politically at all.

All this tawdry behaviour, racial abuse, abuse of comrades for having once had disabilities, and blatant anti-democratic behaviour, is a sign of what happens when a trend capitulates to racism and right-wing politics. Basic socialist consciousness goes out of the window and supposed socialists behave increasingly like gutter reactionaries. It is a sad tale of degeneration and corruption.

Downing Baits the Left with ‘Philosophical’ Gibberish and Nazi Smears

The real thrust of GD’s factional activity is a desire to ingratiate and exculpate himself with capitulators to Zionism on the wider left who had previously accused him of anti-Semitism. And thus hostility to, and repudiation of, the previous SF position on Zionism, and in particularly ID’s 2014 Draft Theses on the Jews and Modern Imperialism.[7]

GD came out with a fusillade of hostility to ourselves, and even to the most advanced elements of the Jewish left who share some elements of our analysis of Zionism and its role in promoting genocidal anti-Palestinian policies by Western imperialist countries, including the United States, who were it not for the activities of the Jewish-Zionist bourgeois factions and lobbies, would have no more reason to endorse specifically genocidal policies against Palestinians than against any other national group on this planet.

Thus he not only accused Tony Greenstein of pro-fascism over Hannah Arendt, in internal discussions he also accused Phil Weiss, the blogger who publishes Mondoweiss, probably the most widely respected Jewish left blog in the United States, of being a ‘Jewish conspiracy’ theorist for articles written by him suggesting that the Zionist lobby played a major role in ensuring that Jimmy Carter, and the elder George Bush, each only served one term as US President, because of acts of disobedience to Zionist demands for hard-line anti-Palestinian policies over settlements, and also dealings with the PLO. And he widened his fascist-baiting attack to even others on the left, publishing on Facebook a bilious attack on Sebastian Budgen, the editor of Historical Materialism, for suggesting in an academic context the need for a dispassionate discussion of the influence of the philosopher Nietzsche on 19th Century history and politics. GD posted an attack on Bugden that suggested he shared fascist ‘social values’. When comrades protested that this was demented, and discredited SF, we were accused, insanely, not of being supporters even of Sebastian Budgen, but rather of being fans of Nietzsche himself!

The issue of the philosophical views of various allegedly pro-fascist philosophers was not a major issue in the dispute, but GD tried to make it so, as a smokescreen to cover up his growing antipathy to consistent anti-Zionism and ID’s Draft Theses. He also used this issue of philosophy to drag in various Zionist figures such as Alan Dershowitz, Ron Rosenbaum, and Dave Rich into the polemic, to accustom his followers to regarding such genocidal anti-Arab racists as authorities on who is a racist or fascist, or who is not. Toward the end of the dispute, GD took to allowing an obvious pseudonymous Zionist troll, one ‘Sven Gölly’, who we suspect is a veteran of many anti-left smear campaigns including those against Corbynities, to post attacks on the Trotskyist Faction on the stolen SF website, just to underline what a good little servant GD now is of the Zionist lobby.

In seeking to defend his original outrageous attack on Tony Greenstein over Hannah Arendt, GD quoted one Ron Rosenbaum, who attacked Arendt for her lack of ethnic, communal sentiment thus:

 “One can still hear this Arendtian shame about ethnicity these days. So parochial! One can hear the echo of Arendt’s fear of being judged as ‘merely Jewish’ in some, not all, of those Jews so eager to dissociate themselves from the parochial concerns of other Jews for Israel. The desire for universalist approval makes them so disdainful of any ‘ethnic’ fellow feeling. After all, to such unfettered spirits, it’s so banal.”[8]

It was pointed out in the course of the discussion what Rosenbaum’s politics and “‘ethnic’ feeling” actually were, and that he had deeply racist ‘ethnic’ feelings about Palestinians, projecting his own genocidal ‘feelings’ onto Palestinians in a way that is classic. For instance this quote was rather relevant. According to Wikipedia, his view is:

“’The Palestinians want a Hitlerite Judenrein state, however much violence it takes to accomplish it. Not separation, elimination.’ The Palestinians are, he asserts, engaged in incessant state and religious incitement to murder Jews. The ‘stabbing intifada’ is not an insurgency, but a matter of ‘the ritual murder of Jews’. Whereas Hitler tried to hide his crimes, the Palestinians celebrate killing Jews.”[9]

 The response to this became a repeated refrain from GD, that to attack the racism of these Zionists was an ad-hominem attack; that you had to refute their ‘arguments’ which were ‘truthful’. This is a grossly hypocritical argument from GD, and completely at odds with the argument that he made against anti-Zionists, that such-and-such a person may have dodgy views (allegedly) about Jews, and therefore to agree with anything they say about anything makes the person who cites them complicit in their (alleged) racism themselves. To agree with Gilad Atzmon, who is Jewish, about anything, makes you (allegedly) an ‘anti-Semite’. But to agree with Ron Rosenbaum, who says that every Palestinian is worse than Hitler, is just fine! That is classic Zionist racism and double standards from GD. To him, now he has made his peace with Zionism, Jews truly are more important than Arabs!

All this racist hypocrisy was instrumental, the real purpose of the polemic was to atone for his previous adherence to genuine anti-Zionism (now dubbed ‘anti-Semitism’) and to hopefully discredit and bury the previous position on Zionism of Socialist Fight. Alan Dershowitz was Trump’s lawyer in his impeachment trial and America’s most prominent Nakba denier, who was torn apart by Norman Finkelstein in his work Beyond Chutzpah. According to GD, to agree with someone like Atzmon who appears to harbour doubts about some aspects of the Nazi holocaust, is to be tainted with supposed racism.

But to cite an outright Nakba denier, one of the most prominent, to attack Gilad Atzmon as a racist and a white supremacist (allegedly), is just fine. Just another manifestation of that double standard that considers today’s oppressors (Jewish-Zionists) as more important and morally superior to their Arab victims, and their supporters, even Jewish ones. Or one might suspect, given GD’s indulgence of pro-Zionist family friends of his, while engaging in bilious attacks on a number of prominent anti-Zionist Jews, especially Jewish ones are the target.

“My Enemy’s Enemy is my Friend”

It is well-known that in the Middle East, where the genocidal oppressors and ethnic cleansers of the Palestinians over the last century or more of Zionist settlement and then the imposition of the state of Israel on the Arab people through dispossession and seemingly endless wars, are Zionist Jews and the ‘democratic’ imperialists, there is an understandable softness and nostalgia for those imperialists’ defeated rivals in the Second World War.

This is a normal response of oppressed peoples everywhere to their oppression, and it worked both ways in imperialist wars and even in the Cold War, with those oppressed by one imperialist camp seeking help from their oppressors’ rivals, with those oppressed by Stalinism seeking help from the imperialists at times, and with those oppressed by imperialism seeking help from the Soviet bloc. There were pro-Axis nationalists at work in WW2 under British colonial rule in India, in Ireland, and in the Middle East. This is no surprise to Marxists, though it may outrage pro-imperialist jingoes.

The oppression of Arabs by the Zionist state has persisted much longer, three-quarters of a century, than the Third Reich, which lasted only 12 years. Thus it is hardly a surprise that this kind of “my enemy’s enemy is my friend” sentiment has deep roots among the Arab masses, and this finds reflection in the actions of political leaders.

So there have  been speeches denying the truth of the Nazi holocaust by some of the most celebrated leaders of the Arab masses and their allies, including Gamal Abdul Nasser, who spoke of “the lie of the 6 million” back in 1964, from Mahmoud Abbas, who is now the stooge leader of the Palestinian authority, but who once wrote a holocaust denial thesis, to the Assad regime, which as is well-known has distributed pro-Nazi material denying the Nazi holocaust for decades, to Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the former Iranian president, who organised international conferences to debate the historicity of the Shoah, to Hamas, whose original, authoritative charter endorsed the Protocols of the Elders of Zion.

 This also has a degree of influence on the most alienated elements of the oppressor people, those such as Atzmon (he is only the best known of a whole milieu of Jewish ‘traitors’) who have abandoned the people of their birth completely and identify with the oppressed. This should hardly be a great surprise either, to Marxists and anti-imperialists. It is not something that we endorse at all, as opponents of imperialism in general, but we do comprehend what drives those oppressed by ‘our’ imperialism, and to a degree many who sympathise with them, to look to ‘their’ oppressors’ enemies for help, or at least some vicarious relief.

So you have to be pretty credulous, and infected with incipient pro-Zionist and Western chauvinism, to cite a racist sociopath like Derhowitz to give testimony as to how Atzmon and Israel Shamir, to name but two, are Nazis and how Atzmon supports the programme of white supremacy. But that is what GD did in the discussion. He managed to drag out the fact that Atzmon, informed that David Duke, the former Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan from the 1960s and 1970s, liked some of his writings about Jewish identity and had similar views about Jewish exclusivism himself (while of course being very much in favour of white exclusivism), paid him a compliment back.

Duke abandoned open fascism and sought ‘respectability’ in both the major American bourgeois parties at various times since the 1980s.  Atzmon compared Duke with Avigdor Liebermann, an ultra-right minister in Israel’s government who favours the wholesale expulsion of the Arab population, and said that compared to Liebermann Duke was a ‘humanist’ as he ‘only’ was in favour of separation and not outright genocide. A foolish and naïve remark characteristic of that trend in the Middle East that sees the avowed enemy of one’s enemy as a potential friend, but in no way indicative of any endorsement of the oppression perpetrated by the likes of Duke.

It is worth noting that in citing Dershowitz, the Nakba denier and defender of massacres, to attack Atzmon, GD praised the Zionist thug as a ‘noted civil libertarian’, a preposterous accolade that really is just as foolish as calling David Duke a ‘humanist’.

Downing/Rich’s ‘Fascist’ Smear Against Atzmon and TF

Then there is his reproduction of the article “Is Gilad Atzmon a fascist?”[10]  by Dave Rich of the Community Security Trust, an organisation that as Tony Greenstein says, “has a hidden agenda which is the political use of ‘anti-Semitism’ as a means of demonising the opponents of Zionism, including Jewish opponents.” This appears to be the political agenda of GD also, now he has capitulated wholesale to Zionism. GD regurgitates Rich’s incomplete quotes from Atzmon where he says in his work Being and Time that:

“Fascism, I believe, more than any other ideology, deserves our attention, as it was an attempt to integrate left and right[, …]”[11]

Unfortunately it does not even quote the complete paragraph, as Atzmon continues:

“… the ‘dream’ and the ‘concrete’ into a unified political system. Fascism was an incredible economic success, but it failed to sustain itself. Why?”[12]

Of course, when you omit the end of the paragraph, you miss out the bit where he says it failed, which makes it rather less than the ‘endorsement’ that Rich says it is. Atzmon answers his own question later in the same section where he writes:

“The answer is that fascism’s appeal were the causes of its failure. Fascism merged the left egalitarian utopia with Right rootedness, mass production and private ownership. In theory this should form a perfect bond, yet it may be possible that the ‘dream’ and the ‘concrete’ cannot be integrated into a single political system. It is the desire that connects being and becoming, yet the desire is, in itself, within the realm of the void. It is mysterious and it cannot be materialised into a system. Fascism’s attempt to touch the Real – its attempt to merge the fantasy and the factual murdered the desire: it was an attempt to make people into deities, and so promised the impossible.”[13]

This is of course idealistic nonsense, but it is clear that despite the tortured reasoning derived from over-indulgence in idealistic philosophy, Atzmon concludes that it is not possible to ‘integrate’ left and right into a ‘single political system’. He could have deduced that by studying some basic historical materialist investigations of capitalism, such as Marx’s Wages, Price and Profit instead of wasting a chunk of his life studying idealistic philosophy in mainstream academia, but this method of investigation of the world obviously did not make him a ‘fascist’. His conclusion that fascism fails because it cannot make people into gods, is a condemnation not only of fascism but also of Neitzsche, whose concept of the god-like ‘supermen’ some consider may have provided ideological inspiration for fascism. So it is clear that, contrary to the smear from Dave Rich, that Atzmon does not think it possible to integrate right and left into a ‘single political system’ and therefore the implication in the title of Dave Rich’s article is just another Zionist smear.

Atzmon’s strength is when he analyses Jewish identity, a subject he is intimately familiar with, in The Wandering Who, which is an important and somewhat ground-breaking book. His great weakness is when he tries to extend the idealistic methods he has learned in academia and which did not particularly disrupt his analysis in The Wandering Who, to other, non-Jewish spheres of politics. There he really does not understand what he is dealing with, and his attempt to apply idealistic analysis to non-Jewish movements and ideologies produces a strange impression of him floating on the surface of reality.

Ironically the schema he comes up with, that of generalising Orwell’s The Lion and the Unicorn to create a world of autonomous nationally-based but non-exclusionary, cooperating egalitarian socialist states, owes much to utopian socialism. It rejects Marxism’s materialist understanding that such things are impossible because the productive forces have long since outgrown national boundaries and hence rational economic planning can only take place on an international scale.

Atzmon rejects that because he considers that ‘cosmopolitanism’, i.e. internationalism, is a cover for Jewish chauvinism and a means for Jews to dominate other peoples. This is simply an erroneous extrapolation from Israeli experience and another indication of the failure of his idealistic view to understand the world. It is also Judeo-centric; Atzmon puts Jews at the centre of absolutely everything, but while the Jewish Question is indeed strategic as pointed out earlier, it is material reality, not ‘Jewish ideology’ that is the determining factor in the world.

But it is legitimate to ask, in the light of GD’s regurgitation of Dave Rich’s smear against Atzmon, the question: “Is Dave Rich a fascist?”.  You can search the entire corpus of Atzmon’s writings and you will not find support for the oppression of any national or ethnic group. This however is not true of Dave Rich. In his work The Left’s Jewish Problem, he baldly states the following:

“Comparing the plight of the Palestinians with the Holocaust performs several functions. Its political goal is to undermine the idea that the Holocaust provided a moral justification and a practical need for the creation of a Jewish state.”[14]

Cut out the cant and the double standards and this says that the Nakba, the ethnic cleansing, the massacres such as Deir Yassin, and the 70+ years of oppression and terror against the Palestinian people have “moral justification”. The argument is clearly racist; it says that the past suffering of one people, the European Jews, at the hands of Hitler, provides “moral justification” for massacres and ethnic cleansing of another people, the Palestinian Arabs. How is this different in principle from someone who justifies the death camps, the gas chambers, the starvation and wilful malign neglect in the camps whose purpose was that disease would get the inmates if the gas chambers did not?

From the point of view of Marxism, of anti-racist universalism, and the interests of the working class, there is no difference. There is no moral difference between someone who supports gassing Jews and someone who supports the massacre and ethnic cleansing of Palestinians. But for GD, in his pro-Zionist, i.e. racist degeneration, ethnic cleansers, pogromists and the like who defend the murder of Arabs, are just fine, and it is perfectly permissible to promote their lying propaganda to smear anti-Zionists.

Downing’s Real Target

But all this is just a means to an end for GD. The real target of all this rancid pro-Zionist hate propaganda was the Draft Theses on the Jews and Modern Imperialism. In conversation with Atzmon in 2018, GD rejected criticisms of its supposed ‘anti-Semitism’ as ‘Zionism’. But now as the concluding point of his renegade, pro-Zionist faction he writes:

“We now repudiate the use of the term ‘the world “Jewish-Zionist bourgeoisie”’ and the whole notion of a Jewish-Zionist imperialist vanguard as antisemitic tropes. We will in future use the term ‘Zionism’ alone in describing the political tendency within the Jewish ethnicity that commits such dreadful crimes under international law against the Palestinian citizens of Israel and those expelled Palestinians primarily in 1948, ‘67 and ‘73, all of whom have the right of return.”[15]

In his own terms, as expounded to Atzmon in his 2018 interview, GD is now advocating ‘Zionist’ politics in denouncing the notion of the Jewish-Zionist bourgeoisie as ‘anti-Semitic’. But this passage is laughably contradictory and anti-Marxist.

First of all it mendaciously appends ‘the world’ to the term ‘the Jewish-Zionist bourgeoisie’. That is not there in the original Draft Theses, which talks about the Jewish-Zionist bourgeoisie as being ‘pan-imperialist’ and even ‘pan-national’ but in a context that makes it clear it is confined to the main Western imperialist countries (which obviously excludes Japan). There is no suggestion of a ‘world’ Jewish-Zionist bourgeoisie in the original theses, so GD is attacking something completely fictional in the manner of Zionist liars like Dave Rich and Alan Dershowitz that he now admires. It’s clear that in appending ‘the world’, GD is using Goebells’ technique of the Big Lie.

The passage notes that “Zionism” is a “political tendency” that exists “within the Jewish ethnicity” but promises to use only the term “Zionism” to describe it. Presumably then, pointing out that Zionism is Jewish will be verboten. But this definition itself says that “Zionism” exists “within the Jewish ethnicity”, i.e. that Zionism is Jewish. But to say that Zionism is Jewish, or is a “political tendency within the Jewish ethnicity” is ‘anti-Semitic’. So by his own logic, GD’s own new ‘definition’ is itself anti-Semitic.

Or perhaps it is saying that to posit Zionism as an ideology of the bourgeoisie “within the Jewish ethnicity” is anti-Semitic? Really? So GD is saying that class analysis of the nature of Zionism is anti-Semitic, and thereby verboten also? It seems like it. It thus seems that he agrees therefore with Dave Rich that Marxism itself is anti-Semitic. For GD, even though Zionism is a bourgeois ideology (it certainly does not represent the historic interests of the proletariat!) and is located “within the Jewish ethnicity” it is apparently ‘anti-Semitic’ to say that that Zionism is the ideology of the Jewish-Zionist bourgeoisie. Even though it is obviously true.

Then there is the concept of the Jewish-Zionist bourgeoisie being a ‘vanguard’. Norman Finkelstein had something to say about that. In his essay ‘Corbyn Mania’[16]  from 2018, he noted that in the United States the non-Jewish bourgeoisie now see the Jewish-Zionist bourgeoisie as a step up in social status from themselves, and thus non-Jewish bourgeois families such as the Clintons and Trumps see their offspring marrying into Jewish families as amounting to ‘marrying up’ the social scale. This corroborates the point in the Draft Theses on the Jews and Modern Imperialism that the wider bourgeoisie see the Jewish-Zionist bourgeoisie as a particularly class-conscious layer of their own class (a ‘vanguard’) and hence themselves award it a higher social status. This is simply empirical observation of the behaviour of the different sections of the bourgeoisie towards each other.

But according to GD, such an observation is an “anti-Semitic trope”. Therefore, logically, GD must also denounce Norman Finkelstein’s 2018 essay as anti-Semitic. This fits in with the reference to Finkelstein in his recent bizarre letter to the Weekly Worker [17]where he appears to endorse Toby Abse’s 1999 Nazi-baiting attack on the CPGB for defending Finkelstein’s The Holocaust Industry against reactionary, pro-Zionist criticism from the SWP’s Alex Callinicos. The same Alex Callinicos who today has his goons strong-arm Palestinian activists who object to the SWP including Zionist racists in its ‘Stand up to Racism’ events.

In the context of this grovelling to Zionism, GD’s claim to still stand for the Palestinian ‘right to return’ is about as meaningful as Rebecca Long-Bailey’s claim to stand for Palestinian rights after she has signed up to the Tory-Zionist Board of Deputies’ ’10 commandments’, one of which is to give Zionist outfits such as the Jewish Labour Movement control of excluding pro-Palestinian activists from the Labour Party on the grounds of supposedly combatting ‘anti-Semitism’. GD’s residual ‘anti-Zionism’ is flagrantly contradicted by his smearing of his own comrades and other anti-Zionist militants, including many Jewish ones, using Zionist material as a weapon. He smears not just Atzmon, but Finkelstein, Greenstein, Weiss and more, as anti-Semitic and/or soft on Nazism. His ‘anti-Zionism’ is meaningless in the light of that.

We Go Forward!

Based on his theft of the Socialist Fight website, which was paid for by the subs of the active members over a period of several years, GD has now announced the ‘expulsion’ of the Trotskyist Faction from Socialist Fight. But that is meaningless. He does not have the votes to expel us. He would need a majority of full members to convene and vote for expulsion to do that. When his political position itself was put to the full members in London and nationally, he failed to win a majority.

What has actually happened is that he has stolen our website and filled it with semi-Zionist, personalist, abusive nonsense. We, the Trotskyist Faction, consider ourselves to be the real core of Socialist Fight as a revolutionary Marxist organisation. We continue to be affiliated to the Liaison Committee of the Fourth International and note that we have never been legitimately expelled from anything. As the real continuity of Socialist Fight we have registered a new website with the domain http://socialistfight.org, or alternatively http://trotskyistfaction.org, to emphasise that we are a principled faction that is determined to carry on with the politics and programme that GD and his renegade clique has betrayed. We also intend to publish a new journal to carry on with the Trotskyist politics of the old Socialist Fight.  We will go forward, let our enemies beware!

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[1] https://socialistfight.com/2015/07/20/gilad-atzmon-on-the-jewish-solidarity-spin/

[2] https://socialistfight.com/2017/12/21/tony-greenstein-and-gilad-atzmon/

[3] Quotes from “Witch-hunters United”, Socialist Fight #27, May-June 2018

[4] See https://socialistfight.com/2019/09/21/what-is-anti-semitism-can-jewish-people-whether-zionist-or-anti-zionist-be-anti-semitic/

Jewish Bolshevism is an anti-communist and antisemitic canard

Stalin, Anti-Semitism and the Naqba: Reply to a Comrade.

On the anti-communism and anti-Semitism of Devon Nola and Gilad Atzmon:

Once Again on ‘Anti-Semitism” and all that Jazz

[5] Morning Star, https://morningstaronline.co.uk/article/f/things-can-only-get-little-bit-better

[6] https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2019/jun/09/mike-pompeo-leaked-recording-corbyn-labour-jewish-leaders

[7] https://socialistfight.com/2016/01/07/draft-theses-on-the-jews-and-modern-imperialism-by-ian-donovan-6-9-2014/

[8] https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2009/10/ron-rosenbaum-vs-hannah-arendt/29379/

[9] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ron_Rosenbaum

[10] https://cst.org.uk/news/blog/2017/11/08/is-gilad-atzmon-a-fascist

[11] Being and Time, Skyscraper 2017, p26

[12] Ibid

[13] ibid, p33

[14] Kindle edition, loc 2875

[15] https://socialistfight.com/2020/02/20/socialist-fight-has-expelled-ian-donovan/

[16] http://normanfinkelstein.com/2018/08/25/finkelstein-on-corbyn-mania/

[17] https://weeklyworker.co.uk/worker/1287/letters/